Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life
Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life
Philip Eade
‘The narrative is as suspenseful as any thriller. Truly, an excellent read’ Lynn Barber, Sunday TimesMarried for almost seventy years to the most famous woman in the world, Prince Philip is the longest-serving royal consort in British history. Yet his origins have remained curiously shrouded in obscurity.In the first book to focus exclusively on his life before the coronation, acclaimed biographer Philip Eade uncovers the extraordinary story of the prince’s turbulent upbringing in Greece, France and Nazi Germany, during which his mother spent five years in a secure psychiatric clinic and his father left him to be brought up by his Mountbatten relations in England just when he needed him most.Remarkably the young prince emerged from this unsettled background a character of singular vitality and dash – self-confident, capable, famously opinionated and devastatingly handsome. Girls fell at his feet, and the princess who was to become his wife was smitten from the age of thirteen.Yet alongside the considerable charm and intelligence, the prince was also prone to volcanic outbursts and to putting his foot in it. Detractors perceived in his behaviour emotional shortcomings, a legacy of his traumatic childhood, which would have profound consequences for his family and the future of the monarchy.Published to coincide with the prince’s ninetieth birthday and containing new material from interviews, archives and film footage, this revelatory biography is the most complete and compelling account yet of his storm-tossed early life.
Philip Eade
Young Prince Philip
His Turbulent Early Life
To my sisters Fiona, Belinda and Jo
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
1 Kings of Greece
2 House of Battenberg
3 Boy’s Own Story
4 Family in Flight
5 Orphan Child
6 Prep School Days
7 Dodging the Hitler Youth
8 Off to Gordonstoun
9 Blow after Blow
10 The Man with the Plan
11 A Good War
12 Osla and Lilibet
13 Steady on, Dickie
14 Nothing Ventured …
15 True Brit
16 Royal Wedding
17 Duke of Hazards
18 Their Happiest Time
19 Second Fiddle
20 Oh, the Future!
21 Her Liege Man
Photographic Insert (#ua391fc71-ec10-5c86-b0a2-85dfa31016da)
Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Philip Eade
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The idea for this biography came a little unexpectedly from a book I briefly toyed with writing about prominent ufologists in the period just after the Second World War. In the course of cobbling together a proposal to try and persuade my sceptical agent, I was struck by the revelation in Francis Wheen’s book How Mumbo Conquered the World that Prince Philip’s equerry once went off at the prince’s bidding to meet an extraterrestrial humanoid at a house in Ealing. The equerry in question, Sir Peter Horsley, had been on the prince’s staff from 1952 until 1955, before climbing to great heights in the RAF. ‘Oh God,’ sighed an official at the Ministry of Defence when Horsley’s memoirs came out in 1997, ‘how unfortunate that the public will learn that the man who had his finger on the button of Strike Command was seeing little green men.’
For better or worse, the public also learned that, for several years in the early 1950s, Prince Philip had enthusiastically swapped UFO stories with his uncle Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, a fellow subscriber to the Flying Saucer Review, and kept himself abreast of developments in the field. According to Horsley, ‘Prince Philip was open to the immense possibilities leading to space exploration, while at the same time not discounting that, just as we were on the fringe of breaking into space, so older civilizations in the universe might already have done so’. Horsley also recalled that the prince ‘agreed that I could investigate the more credible reports provided that I kept it all in perspective and did not involve his office in any kind of publicity or sponsorship’. A number of witnesses were invited to Buckingham Palace to discuss their experiences, partly, as Horsley later explained, to ‘put them on the spot’ and to test their honesty ‘in the presence of royalty, a method as effective as any truth serum’.
This was all intriguing news to me, yet the more I read about Prince Philip, the more it became apparent that his interest in flying saucers was very far from being the most intriguing thing about him. He is, after all, famously revered as a living god by the islanders of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. More than anything, though, I was drawn to the remarkable story of his early life, which seemed to be overflowing with drama and colour – and yet there did not seem to be a particularly full or dispassionate written account of it.
I am extremely grateful to everyone who helped me in various ways with this book. At Buckingham Palace, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Sir Brian McGrath, Prince Philip’s extra equerry. While Sir Brian never pretended that my project was especially welcome, neither was he in the least bit obstructive. On the contrary, he was very helpful in enabling interviews with Prince Philip’s friends and relations. Both he and Dame Anne Griffiths, Prince Philip’s librarian and archivist, also helped with access to various papers at Buckingham Palace, the Royal Archives and the Hesse State Archives in Darmstadt, and took the trouble to read an early draft of my manuscript and suggest corrections of fact and interpretation. It should be stressed, however, that this biography is in no sense approved or authorized, and I was therefore under no obligation to omit things and incidents that might be deemed discreditable to Prince Philip or the royal family. It was never my intention to be sniping or mean-spirited. However, I knew that for the portrait to be credible to neutral readers, some of the foibles, or perceived foibles, needed to be given an airing alongside Prince Philip’s finer qualities. I am equally confident that readers will respond more sympathetically towards him in consequence. I accept full responsibility for any errors there may be in the final version.
I am extremely grateful to all those who agreed to talk to (or correspond with) me about various aspects of Prince Philip’s early life, including, in no particular order, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Lady Pamela Hicks, Lady (Myra) Butter, Philip Ziegler, Kenneth Rose, The Hon. Mrs Janie Spring, Captain North Dalrymple-Hamilton, Lord Gainford, The Hon. Mrs Sarah Baring, The Dowager Countess of Cromer, Lady Macmillan, Lady Margaret Stirling-Aird, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, The Hon. Mrs (Oliver) Dawnay, Robin Dalton, Daphne Davie (née Brock), Major General David Alexander, Air Vice-Marshal Sir John Severne, Patrick Kidner, Sir Jeremy Chance, Clive Stewart-Lockhart, Landgrave Moritz of Hesse, Prince and Princess Ludwig of Baden, Professor Max Boisot, Peter Saunders, Leading Signalman Ted Longshaw, Lester May, Jimmy Taylor, John Wynne and the late Lord (Aubrey) Buxton.
Among the archivists who helped me, I am grateful to Pamela Clark at the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle; Professor Chris Woolgar, Archivist of the Mountbatten Papers at the University of Southampton; Professor Echart G. Franz at the Hesse State Archives in Darmstadt; Michael Churchill at Cheam; Michael Meister and Sophie Weidlich at Schule Schloss Salem; Louise Harvey at Gordonstoun; the staff of the National Archives at Kew in London; the staff of Churchill College Archives in Cambridge; the staff of the British Library; the staff of the newspaper library at Colindale, London; and the staff of the Telegraph newspaper library. I am also extremely grateful to the staff of the London Library, where the majority of this book was written.
I am greatly indebted to various published sources. Among these, Hugo Vickers’s scrupulously researched authorized biography of Prince Philip’s mother, Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, was an invaluable source of otherwise unavailable family information and letters, many fragments of which I have cited.
Among the biographies of Prince Philip himself, those that I found most useful were by Basil Boothroyd (Philip: An Informal Biography), Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia (Prince Philip: A Family Portrait), Tim Heald (The Duke: A Portrait of Prince Philip) and Gyles Brandreth (Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage). I also relied heavily on several of Philip Ziegler’s books, principally his outstanding biography Mountbatten, and on the excellent royal biographies by Sarah Bradford (George VI and Elizabeth), Ben Pimlott (The Queen), Robert Lacey (Majesty and Royal), and William Shawcross (Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother). Other particularly useful books included Jonathan Petropoulos’s Royals and the Reich, a study of the relationship between the Hesse family and the Nazi regime, and Graham Turner’s Elizabeth: The Woman and the Queen.
My literary agent, Caroline Dawnay, was, as ever, a constant source of sound advice, excellent ideas and much needed encouragement. I was extremely fortunate to have as my editor at Harper Press Martin Redfern, who was a pleasure to work with and made numerous editorial suggestions which greatly improved the book. My thanks, too, to Richard Collins, for his painstaking copy editing, to Sarah Hopper, for her very willing and resourceful picture research, and to Christopher Phipps, for his exemplary index. I am particularly grateful also to Victoria Lane, who read and edited an early draft of the first half of the book, and did much to make it better, and to Robert Gray, who very generously agreed to read the whole manuscript, in the course of which he tightened a great many of my loose sentences and made countless perceptive comments.
Many thanks, too, to Oliver James, Robert Hardman, Richard Davenport-Hines, David Profumo, Abigail Napp, Anne de Courcy, Francis Wheen, Richard Ingrams, Lucy Cavendish, Annabel Price, Saffron Rainey, Violet Hudson, Kate Hubbard, Matthew Bell, James Owen, James Kidner, Jane Stewart-Lockhart, Richard Mead, Richard Rycroft, Miranda Seymour, Alex von Tunzelmann, Fiammetta Rocco, Chelsea Renton, David Ford, Dan Renton, Kim Reczek, Zara D’Abo, Tom Faulkner, Epoh Beech, Rodolf de Salis, John Lloyd, Giles Milton, John McNally, Joachim von Halasz, Eloise Moody, Stephen Birmingham, Kitty Kelley, Michael Bloch, John Parker, Gyles Brandreth, Janie Lewis, Olivia Hunt, Helen Ellis, Minna Fry, Nicky and Jasmine Dunne, Fiona and Euan McAlpine, Belinda and Patrick Macaskie, Jo and Richard Wimbush, my mother and father, and anyone else I may have forgotten to mention.
PROLOGUE
Autumn 1937
At around noon on 16 November 1937, Prince Philip’s heavily pregnant sister Cecile set off on the short drive through the woods from the Hesse family’s old hunting box at Wolfsgarten to Frankfurt aerodrome in order to fly to London for a family wedding. With her were her husband, George Donatus, or ‘Don’, who had recently succeeded his father as the Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, his widowed mother, the Dowager Grand Duchess, their two young sons, aged six and four, who were due to be pages, a lady-in-waiting and the best man.
The only member of the Grand Ducal family left behind at home was their baby daughter Johanna, who was too young to go to the wedding.
By the mid-1930s, air travel had become sufficiently popular for Bradshaw’s to begin publishing its monthly International Air Guide, looking much like a train timetable although unashamedly aimed at the travelling elite, with advertisements only for luxury hotels. However, it was still rare compared with travel by sea or rail and most Europeans considered it too risky and unpredictable, particularly in the high winds and dense fogs of late autumn. In December 1935, fourteen-year-old Philip’s grandmother had pleaded in vain with him before one of his frequent continental trips to visit relations: ‘This time I really think you had better not fly across, as it is such a stormy time of the year.’
Philip’s sister Cecile shared their grandmother’s misgivings. She was reputedly so terrified of aeroplanes that she always wore black when she flew. However, Don Hesse was a dedicated and fearless flyer, like his young brother-in-law, and with an aerodrome so close to home, he was not one to be put off by the potential hazards.
They took off just before two o’clock in bright sunshine in a three-engine Junkers monoplane operated by the Belgian airline Sabena and captained by one of its most experienced airmen, Tony Lambotte, the personal friend and pilot of King Leopold III, assisted by an engineer, wireless operator and mechanic. The plane had been scheduled to land en route near Brussels, but thick fog had swept quickly in from the North Sea and so they were instructed by wireless to proceed instead to Steene aerodrome on the coast near Ostend. There, too, fog had reduced visibility to a few yards, yet the pilot nevertheless went ahead with his descent, flying blind. The aerodrome staff fired three rockets to help him find his way, but only the first one worked.
An eyewitness later described having seen the aeroplane coming down out of the fog and hitting the top of a brickworks’ chimney, 150ft high, ‘at about 100 miles an hour. One wing and one of the engines broke off, and both crashed through the roof of the works. The remainder of the aeroplane turned over and crashed to the ground in the brickfield about 50 yards further on, where it at once burst into flames.’
Fire engines and ambulances raced to the scene but they could not get near the burning wreckage until there was no hope of there being any survivors. Additional news from Ostend later added a poignant footnote to the tragedy. Firemen sifting through the charred wreckage of the plane had stumbled upon the remains of an infant, prematurely delivered when the plane crashed, lying beside the crumpled body of Cecile.
The discovery gave rise to the theory that the pilot had only attempted to land after he became aware that the Grand Duchess had begun to give birth.
At Gordonstoun School in Morayshire it fell to the German émigré headmaster Kurt Hahn to break the terrible news to sixteen-year-old Philip, who would never forget the ‘profound shock’ with which he heard what had happened to his sister and her family.
Even before this latest tragedy, the young prince had suffered more than his share of blows during his short life and, perhaps thus fortified, he ‘did not break down’, so his headmaster later recorded. ‘His sorrow was that of a man.’
The next week, Philip travelled alone to Germany for the funeral at Darmstadt, the Hesse family’s home town south of Frankfurt. As the coffins were borne through streets festooned with swastikas, he cut a distinctly forlorn figure walking behind them in his civilian dark suit and overcoat, his white-blond hair standing out against the surrounding dark military greatcoats. Beside him marched his surviving brothers-in-law – Prince Christoph of Hesse, the husband of Philip’s youngest sister Sophie, the most conspicuous in his SS garb; and Christoph’s brother Prince Philipp of Hesse walking alongside in an SA brown shirt. Philip’s uncle Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten followed just behind in British naval dress.
The streets of Darmstadt were lined with detachments of soldiers in Nazi uniforms and, as the procession passed, many in the crowd raised their outstretched arms in a full ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting
– a gesture that Philip had become accustomed to seeing as a schoolboy in Nazi Germany four years earlier and on regular visits there ever since. Don and Cecile had recently joined the Nazi party themselves. Hitler and Goebbels had sent messages of sympathy; Goering attended the funeral in person.
This strange and desperately sad occasion was also the first time that Philip’s parents had seen each other since 1931, when his mother, who had been born deaf, had been committed to a secure psychiatric sanatorium after suffering a nervous breakdown. Shortly afterwards his father had closed down the family home near Paris and taken himself off to live in the South of France, leaving ten-year-old Philip to be brought up in Britain by his wife’s family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens. For almost five years he had heard nothing from his mother and he had become reacquainted with her only shortly before the disaster that befell Cecile.
Almost exactly a decade after the tragedy, Prince Philip married the most eligible young woman in the world, heir to the British throne. As he approaches his ninetieth birthday – two years after surpassing the record of George III’s Queen Charlotte as the longest-serving consort in British history – still walking dutifully a pace or two behind his wife, emitting the odd robust remark, it is easy to forget what a turbulent time he had when he was younger.
ONE
Kings of Greece
Although he has been married for more than sixty years to the most enduringly famous woman in the world, Prince Philip’s own origins have remained strangely shrouded in obscurity. ‘I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father,’ he remarked ruefully in the 1970s. ‘Most people think that Dickie [Mountbatten] is my father anyway.’
The easiest way of understanding Prince Philip’s paternal ancestry is to start with his grandfather, King George I of Greece. A dashing figure, seen in photographs sporting a range of spectacular moustaches, King George was born Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg in 1845 in Copenhagen, the younger son of an army officer whose meagre pay meant that his children grew up in comparative poverty. Their home, the Yellow Palace, was not especially palatial, with a front door that led straight on to the pavement,
their lifestyle scarcely regal, with William’s mother doing much of the housework and his sisters sharing a room and making their own clothes. As a family, the Glücksburgs were loud and frivolous, informal and uncultured, apt to ‘make funny noises and yell if they saw anyone trying to write a letter’.
They were also distinctly unspoilt and unpretentious, yet within a very short space of time they had ‘colonised royal Europe’, as one chronicler put it.
In 1852, William’s father was unexpectedly named as heir to the Danish throne, by virtue of being a godson and distant kinsman of the childless king, although for the time being this made no difference to his income and the family still struggled to make ends meet.
However, their status changed dramatically in 1863, when, within a year, the father succeeded as King Christian IX of Denmark, William’s sister Alexandra married the Prince of Wales, destined to become King Edward VII, and a delegation from Greece came and asked seventeen-year-old William to be their king. Another sister, Dagmar, would shortly marry the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia, while yet another, Thyra, married the heir to the throne of Hanover – although that was soon dissolved by Prussia after the 1866 Anglo-Prussian war. Within the next half-century, the descendants of Christian IX would occupy no fewer than nine European thrones.
Only the descendants of Queen Victoria were more widely spread.
King George I, as William became on his accession, later maintained that he had accepted the Greek throne with great reluctance, since it meant abandoning his chosen naval career to go and rule a far-off country with a turbulent people and a language he did not speak.
Greece had only recently broken free from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the long and bloody war of independence that had claimed the life of Lord Byron among countless others. The new country – unstable, poor and less than half the size of what it was to become during George’s reign – was formally recognized by the London Protocol of 1830, in which the protecting powers, France, Great Britain and Russia, stipulated that a hereditary sovereign should be chosen from outside the country to lessen the chances of internal disputes. In 1833 a young Bavarian prince called Otto had arrived in a British frigate to fill this vacancy, but his tactless and despotic rule caused countless insurrections. In 1862 he was deposed in a bloodless revolution and left Greece just as he had arrived, in a British warship.
Many Greek people had wanted to have as his successor Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, whose portrait was carried through the streets of Athens by a cheering mob. But Alfred was ineligible as a prince of one of the protecting powers; and besides, his mother did not like the idea. Several alternatives were suggested before eventually they settled on the young Danish prince as the least contentious candidate.
When he first arrived in Greece, he was still not yet eighteen and as he took the oath to the new constitution at the national assembly, the British ambassador was moved by ‘the sight of this slight, delicate stripling, standing alone amidst a crowd of callous, unscrupulous politicians, many of whom had been steeped to the lips in treason, and swearing to observe, as he has so faithfully done, the most unworkable of charters, from which nearly every safeguard had been studiously eliminated’.
Athens then was no more than a collection of villages, with a combined population of about 45,000, and the young king developed an endearing habit of walking alone through the streets, stopping every now and then to talk to passers-by. So determined was he to master the Greek language and customs that over the next four years he never left the country, travelling instead to all corners of his realm by ship, carriage, mule and on foot.
While he never entirely lost his slight Danish accent, King George’s enthusiasm and lack of affectation were greatly appreciated by the Greek people. On Monday mornings, he was available to any of his subjects who wanted to come and air their grievances. He also gave an audience to any foreigner who requested one, provided they put on dress-clothes and white tie. The king tended to stand throughout these interviews and one of those who paid a visit, E. F. Benson, was disconcerted by his habit of continuously rising on his toes and rocking back on his heels. Benson found this ‘as infectious as yawning’ and it was only with the greatest effort that he could prevent himself from following the royal example. Aspirational American ladies began flocking to Athens because, as one of them remarked, ‘The royal family of Greece is the easiest royal family to become acquainted with’.
Affable and approachable the young King George may have been, but he still had to learn to stand up for himself against his wily ministers. Shortly after his arrival, a story was told of one cabinet meeting at which the boy king stood up and went over to a map to illustrate a point he was making. When he returned to his seat he noticed that his watch was missing. He looked around the table: ‘Will whoever has my watch please return it?’ he demanded. His ministers stared blankly back at him. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ the king continued, ‘I’m not accustomed to this type of joke. I’d like to have my watch back.’ Still nobody spoke. Adopting a sterner tone, the king announced that he was going to put out the light and count to sixty. ‘If I find the watch again on the table, the incident will be closed,’ he said. In the darkness he called the seconds out loud. When he turned the lights back on his silver inkstand had vanished as well.
Apart from dealing with his ministers and frequent changes of government (forty-two in the first twenty-five years of his reign), he also had to re-establish the rather ramshackle court, train his own aides-de-camp, butlers, footmen and so forth, and set the appropriate tone, although to begin with his youthful demeanour made it ‘sometimes difficult for his daily companions to maintain the respectful reserve and gravity due to a royal station’.
The young king was also regularly reminded by his counsellors of his dynastic responsibilities, to marry and produce a son born on Greek soil, and so in 1867, aged twenty-one, he visited his sister in Russia, where he hoped to find a wife.
Tsar Alexander II had persuaded George that his was the only country where he would find a girl with the requisite combination of royal breeding and Orthodox faith. The two-month trip would also enable him to see how the vast empire was run. He lost no time as regards his primary purpose and on a visit to the tsar’s younger brother Constantine at Pavlovsk he promptly proposed to the Grand Duke’s fifteen-year-old daughter Olga, a shy and pretty girl with beautiful dark eyes, whom Queen Victoria had thought might do rather well for her son Alfred.
Engaged within a week of meeting, they were married shortly after her sixteenth birthday in an elaborate five-day ceremony at the Winter Palace.
For her arrival in Athens, Queen Olga thoughtfully wore a dress in the Greek national colours of blue and white which delighted the huge crowd and her ‘fresh young beauty’ soon won the hearts of her subjects.
With her came a Russian lady-in-waiting, a governess and a trunk full of dolls and teddy bears to complete the entourage. At times overwhelmed and frightened by the reception she received, the young queen was once found hiding beneath the palace staircase ‘hugging her favourite Russian stuffed bear, and weeping bitterly’.
She never did entirely overcome her homesickness – whenever a Russian ship docked at Piraeus, she could scarcely keep away from it – but the marriage was extremely successful and as queen she won the enduring love of the Greek people.
Olga’s first child, a son, was born barely nine months after the wedding and named Constantine after the last emperor of Byzantine Greece, an augury which prompted much rejoicing. She went on to have a further seven children, three girls (one of whom survived only three months) and four more boys. Philip’s father, Andrew, known as Andrea, was the last but one, born in 1882 at Tatoï, the royal family’s country estate, some thirty miles north of Athens. He was premature and so tiny that he spent his first few days in a cigar box being fed with a toothpick,
however after being wet-nursed by a ‘pleasant-looking peasant from the island of Andros, called Athena’,
he eventually grew into a tall and athletic figure, ‘like a thoroughbred horse’ according to Philip’s aunt Marie Bonaparte.
By common consent he was the most handsome of the king’s sons. It was from him that Philip inherited his high-domed forehead, his ‘fine nose and lips and the narrow Mountbatten eyes’ coming from his mother.
Andrea grew up with his brothers and sisters at the gaunt royal palace which had been built by King Otto on a hill overlooking old Athens and was extensively ransacked after his departure. Nowadays used as the Greek parliament, during Andrea’s childhood it was an ‘excessively uncomfortable’ family home, so his younger brother Christopher recalled, with only one bathroom where the taps emitted a dismal trickle of water and the odd defunct cockroach.
As a boy, Andrea suffered at least one bout of typhoid, presumed to have been caught from the palace drains.
Winters were especially spartan, with cold winds whistling through the long, dim galleries and countless unused rooms. King George seems to have grown sterner with fatherhood and whatever the weather bade his sons get up at six each morning for a cold bath and then lessons at 6.30 sharp. His sister Alexandra, who came to visit in 1893, when Andrea was eleven, noted that the king was ‘rather tyrannical in the family’ and failed to take his children into his confidence even when they grew up, which embittered them towards him.
However, he would occasionally unbend to lead bicycling or roller-skating processions around the palace with the whole family following in order of age.
He told his children: ‘You must never forget that you are foreigners in this country, but you must make them [the Greek people] forget it.’
The eldest children spoke Greek to each other at home and English to their parents, who in turn conversed in German. Andrea was always more Greek than any of his siblings and as a boy flatly refused to speak any other language.
Although George liked discipline and uniforms, he was in other respects a relatively down-to-earth monarch, and the atmosphere at his court was generally far more relaxed than elsewhere in Europe. The princes and princesses were known by their Christian names alone and often hailed as such in the street. They all grew up with a love of practical jokes. ‘Anything could happen when you got a few of them together,’ according to Philip. ‘It was like the Marx brothers.’
Court balls were notably democratic. A foreign guest once hired a carriage to drive him to the palace for one of these parties, only for his coachman to stipulate: ‘Do you mind going rather early, because I’m going there myself and shall have to go home and change?’ The foreign gentleman laughed at what he thought was a rather good joke; but later in the evening, there was his driver, resplendent in evening clothes, dancing with the wife of a minister.
There was a fairy-tale quality to the whole set-up. When E. F. Benson visited in 1893 he recorded that on Sunday afternoons a small compartment was often reserved on the steam tram that ran between Athens and the coast at Phaleron; when it stopped opposite the palace, the king and his family would emerge to the sound of a bugler. If they failed to come at once, the driver would impatiently touch the whistle. Benson found Greece to be an
astonishing little kingdom, the like of which, outside pure fiction, will never again exist in Europe … its army dressed in Albanian costume (embroidered jacket, fustinella, like a ballet skirt, fez, white gaiters, red shoes with tassels on the toes like the seeds of dandelions), its fleet of three small cruisers, its national assembly of bawling Levantines and its boot-blacks called Agamemnon and Thucydides, was precisely like the fabulous kingdom of Paflagonia in The Rose and the Ring, or some Gilbertian realm of light opera.
Every other summer the family would travel to Denmark, where King Christian IX and his wife Queen Louise had their descendants to stay en masse at the vast Fredensborg Palace. With all the court attendants and personal servants, the house parties numbered up to three hundred, and apart from the Greek royal family, included the Prince and Princess of Wales and Tsar Alexander III and Tsarina Marie Feodorovna (as King George’s sister Dagmar had now become). Court etiquette was dispensed with during the day, when the tsar would take the children off to catch tadpoles or steal apples, but for dinner they all entered the big hall in a long procession arm in arm, preceded by the tsar, who offered his arm to Queen Louise, and the rest following according to rank.
There were also regular trips to Russia – across the Black Sea to Sebastopol where the luxurious imperial train awaited – and to Corfu, one of the Ionian islands given to Greece by Britain on George’s accession to the throne, and where the municipality had presented the new king with a villa, Mon Repos, on a promontory just to the south of Corfu Town. But most of their time away from Athens was spent at Tatoï, Andrea’s birthplace, the royal estate of 40,000 acres in the pine-scented foothills of Mount Parnés, high enough to be much cooler than the capital. After buying Tatoï in 1871, King George had established a vineyard to produce an alternative to the pine-infused retsina, which he detested, and a butter-making dairy farm with a range of Danish-style stone buildings. For those who were not well disposed towards their imported monarch there was evidence at Tatoï that he had not embraced his adopted country quite as wholeheartedly as he liked to make out.
By 1886, the king had replaced the original small villa with a replica of a hideous Victorian-style house that stood in the grounds of his wife’s family home, Pavlovsk, and so Tatoï became the one place where Queen Olga never felt homesick; she celebrated her birthday there each year with a big party for all the estate workers. The family all grew to love Tatoï and most of them, including Andrea, are buried in the wooded cemetery there. But their white marble graves are seldom visited nowadays. Since 1967, when the last Greek king, Constantine II, went into exile in Surrey, the estate has become overgrown and the buildings are now mostly ruins. A few picnic tables scattered about the park hint at the symbolic gesture of giving Tatoï to the republican Greek people of today, but few visitors come here now and if you ask for directions from Athens, you are almost guaranteed to get a blank look.
Andrea’s childhood was on the whole steady, but there were also events of great sadness. The first of these occurred when he was nine, when his sister Alexandra died while giving birth to her son, Dimitri, three years after her marriage to Grand Duke Paul of Russia. The whole family, including Andrea, travelled to Moscow, where the young Grand Duchess lay in state in a special room at the station, and then on to St Petersburg for the funeral. One of Andrea’s elder brothers later recalled that it was ‘all so unexpected and awful that the shock and sorrow overpowered us all’.
King George, who doted on his daughter, never got over it.
For all the king’s personal popularity, Greece remained a turbulent and violent country, and he survived several assassination attempts. In 1898, while out driving with his daughter Marie – later Grand Duchess George of Russia – his carriage was attacked by two men who opened fire with rifles at close range. Marie had a red bow in her hat which her father thought would make her an easy target for them ‘so he quickly stood up,’ she recalled, ‘put his hand on my neck and forced me down. With his other hand he menaced them with his walking stick.’ Both horses were hit and slightly wounded and a footman was injured in the leg; however the king and his daughter were miraculously unscathed.
When he was fourteen, Andrea began attending classes twice a week at the military college at Athens, where he was drilled by German officers and became quite friendly with the future dictator Theodore Pangalos,
an association that may later have saved his life. From the age of seventeen, he was privately tutored by another future revolutionary, Major Panayotis Danglis, who privately noted that his new charge was tall, quick and intelligent – and short-sighted.
The king was forever urging Danglis to increase Andrea’s hours of tuition, and when the family went on holiday to Corfu in the spring of 1900 Andrea was made to stay in and attend to his military studies rather than go on many of the picnics and excursions.
In 1902, aged twenty, Andrea was examined by a panel that included his father, his elder brothers, the prime minister, the archbishop, the war minister and half the teaching staff of the military academy. The king had been keen to ensure that the test was as rigorous as it could be, but they were unanimous in passing Andrea and he was duly commissioned as a subaltern in the cavalry. Shortly after this he met the beautiful seventeen-year-old Princess Alice of Battenberg, the girl who was to become his wife.
TWO
House of Battenberg
The House of Battenberg to which Alice belonged was slightly older than the House of Greece and equally romantic in its origins. Alice’s grandfather was Prince Alexander of Hesse, officially the third son of the famously ugly Grand Duke Louis II of Hesse and by Rhine but widely assumed to have been sired by the Grand Duchess’s handsome chamberlain, Baron Augustus Senarclens von Grancy, with whom the duchess had been openly living for three years by the time Alexander was born in 1823.
Alexander’s younger sister Marie, who was thought to have the same biological father, went on to marry the future Tsar Alexander II. Hence, at the age of eighteen, Alexander joined the tsar’s imperial army as a colonel, and was later promoted to major general when his sister produced an heir. However, his career faltered after he fell in love with Marie’s Polish lady-in-waiting, Julie Hauke, who, although a countess, was deemed to be unacceptably beneath his rank.
Julie became pregnant and Alexander married her, with the result that he was banished from Russia. His Hessian family was equally dismayed by the match but his brother, Louis III, nevertheless revived the dormant title of Battenberg – a small town in the north of the Grand Duchy – for Julie, with the quality of countess, later raised to princess. Alexander remained a prince but it was stressed that no child of their morganatic marriage would have a claim to the Hessian throne.
Their eldest son was Alice’s father, Prince Louis of Battenberg. From an early age Louis was determined to depart from the Hessian soldiering tradition and become a sailor, but there were only a handful of vessels in the German fleet at that time, so in 1868, aged fourteen, he set out for England to join the Royal Navy. Considering that he never entirely lost his German accent he had a remarkably successful career, culminating in his appointment as First Sea Lord, the pinnacle of his profession, in 1912. Tall and handsome, with dark, hooded eyes, Louis was also a good dancer and an entertaining raconteur, and as a young midshipman he had wooed a succession of pretty girls in the ports where his ship put in. His dalliances did not always require much effort. As an orderly officer in the suite of his cousin, the Prince of Wales, on his tour of India in 1875, he recalled one evening when after dinner each member of the prince’s entourage was guided to his own private ‘enormous divan with many soft cushions. Refreshments and smoking material were laid out on a little table. On the divan reclined a native girl in transparent white garments.’ On another occasion, when the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir arranged for a well-born girl to be placed in the Prince of Wales’s tent, Louis contrived to transfer her to his own.
A few years later, while serving as an officer of the royal yacht Osborne, Louis fell in love with the Prince of Wales’s mistress, Lillie Langtry, the beautiful Jersey-born actress. When she became pregnant, there were at least two other possible candidates for the child’s paternity, but Louis believed that he was the father and gallantly told his parents that he intended to stand by Lillie.
His parents were anxious to avoid a scandal, however, and promptly arranged a financial settlement for her. Queen Victoria then fixed it for Louis to be posted to the frigate Inconstant, which was to undertake a voyage round the world under sail, ‘a project designed to keep him out of harm’s way for a long time’.
Soon after his return he set his romantic sights on his young first cousin once removed from the main branch of the Hessian royal family, whom he married in 1884. His bride was twenty-year-old Princess Victoria, who had been born in 1863 at Windsor Castle, the eldest of seven children of Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse and Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s second daughter. Princess Victoria had experienced profound sadness during her short life, losing her younger brother, Fritz, when he fell out of a window at the age of ten, and as a teenager unwittingly initiating an even greater family tragedy. In the winter of 1878, aged fifteen, she had fallen ill with diphtheria, but before the symptoms of her illness became apparent she had read aloud parts of Alice in Wonderland to her five younger siblings.
All but one of them had caught the disease, as had her father, the Grand Duke. Her mother, Alice, had insisted on nursing them all and, though urgently warned not to do so by her doctors, had hugged and kissed her son while telling him that his little sister May had died. A month later Alice, too, succumbed to the disease. She was thirty-five.
After their mother’s death, young Victoria had taken charge of running the household and looking after her four surviving siblings – Ella, Irene, Ernie and Alix – supported from afar by her grandmother, Queen Victoria, who urged her to ‘look upon me as a mother’.
By the time she fell in love with Louis, she was still only nineteen, he twenty-eight, tall, dashing and sun-tanned from his travels – ‘a fairy-tale prince’ according to at least one biographer.
In some ways they seemed ill-suited. Despite his undoubted qualities, Louis was rather flashy, and loved dressing up in uniforms – he also boasted a large tattoo of a dragon stretching from his chest and to his legs.
Victoria was on the whole more self-effacing and was slightly embarrassed by Louis’ sartorial flamboyance. She was also more of a free spirit, as well as being highly intelligent. ‘Radical in her ideas,’ wrote Philip Ziegler, ‘insatiably curious, argumentative to the point of perversity, she leavened the somewhat doctrinaire formality of Prince Louis.’
Despite their differences, it proved to be an extremely successful marriage and produced four remarkable children.
Philip’s mother, Alice, was the eldest of these, ‘a fine sturdy baby’
born in 1885, at Windsor Castle, like her mother, in the presence of Queen Victoria, who from time to time helped the family out financially and did what she could to advance Louis’ naval career.
Alice was a handsome child, tall and slender with golden hair and large brown eyes.
However, she was slow in learning to talk and often had a strange faraway look,
which her mother at first mistook for absentmindedness. It was not until she was four that an aurist pronounced her almost completely deaf due to a thickening of the Eustachian tubes, which at that time was deemed inoperable although nowadays it would be curable.
Her condition, which improved very slightly as she grew older, made her unusually self-reliant, able to spend hours happily absorbed in her own company. Her mother was adamant that she should not draw attention to her disability and she was thus forbidden from asking anyone to repeat what they had said.
Required to disguise her confusion as best she could, she soon became a brilliant lip-reader and, because the family moved about so much, following Louis’ postings in Britain and Malta and summer holidays at the various Hessian schlosses, she learned to do so in several languages. Acquaintances often failed to notice any defect, as her mother would have wished, and so striking were her beauty, poise and accomplishments that the Prince of Wales reputedly remarked that ‘no throne is too good for her’.
In June 1902, she went to stay at Buckingham Palace for the coronation of King Edward VII, and met Andrea, Queen Alexandra’s nephew, who appeared to her to be ‘exactly like a Greek God’, so she later told her grandson Prince Charles.
The coronation was delayed at the last minute when the king fell ill with appendicitis, but there was still time before the various guests dispersed for Andrea and Alice to fall in love and become privately engaged. Alice’s mother Victoria later admitted that to begin with she was not in favour of this arrangement, thinking them too young.
It was also said – though she did not admit this – that she thought her daughter could do better than the fourth son of the insecure and impecunious King of Greece.
In July Alice and her mother returned home to Heiligenberg, from where she wrote to Andrea every day. On one occasion, when a week had gone by without a letter from him, a friend found her in tears, tormented by the thought that something must have happened to him or that he had changed his mind. The next morning she arrived at school glowing, having just received five letters in the post from Greece.
After an emergency operation to remove his appendix, Edward VII was well enough to be crowned in early August and Andrea and Alice returned to Buckingham Palace and travelled in the same carriage to Westminster Abbey, together with Alice’s mother and Andrea’s elder brother, George. After the coronation there was a further separation while Andrea was away on military duty in Greece, but in May 1903 he returned, Edward VII gave his consent and their engagement became official. The announcement came as a shock to some of the snootier European royalty, the octogenarian Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz bemoaning ‘the very youthful betrothal, so odd, no money besides!’ She even questioned the attendance of Andrea’s aunt, Queen Alexandra, at the wedding: ‘Why? There is surely no reason for it, a Battenberg, daughter of an illegitimate father, he a fourth son of a newly baked King!’
Still, the wedding at Darmstadt in October was a spectacular event and drew an impressive array of European royalty. Among those present was Tsar Nicholas II – Andrea’s first cousin, son of his aunt Dagmar, and husband of Alice’s aunt Alix – who gave the couple a Wolseley motor car and threw a bag of rice in Alice’s face as the couple drove away in it.
Three hundred and fifty Russian detectives patrolled the town to ensure the tsar’s safety.
There were two religious ceremonies, Protestant and Russian Orthodox, the first preceded by a thirty-strong royal procession into the chapel, followed by Andrea and his parents, and lastly Alice with hers. During the nervous exchange of vows, Alice was defeated by the bushiness of the priest’s beard and failed to lip-read the questions, so when asked whether she consented freely to marriage she replied ‘No’, and when asked whether she had promised her hand to someone else she said ‘Yes’.
They began their married life in a wing of the royal palace in Athens, spending summers at Tatoï or with her parents in England, Malta and Germany. Their first child, Margarita, was born in 1905, and that autumn they all moved to Larissa, a garrison town in Thessaly on the Turkish border, where Andrea was responsible for transforming mountain goatherds into cavalrymen.
Shortly after their return to Athens the following spring, their second daughter, Theodora, known in the family as Dolla, was born.
In 1907 the Greek royal family came under attack in the local press due to inflated estimates of the king’s wealth and a rumour that the princes were to receive annuities. ‘To be remunerated for doing nothing is the privilege of the Russian Grand Dukes,’ snarled one newspaper. In another the princes were accused of failing to take the lead in times of trouble, and of ‘loafing about the boulevards of Paris’ while Salonika was set ablaze by Bulgarians in 1902.
The British ambassador Sir Francis Elliot considered the charge of indifference undeserved and the criticisms ‘characteristic of this country where liberty is confounded with license, and disrespect for authority mistaken for independence’.
The rumblings continued, though, and in August 1909 disgruntled officers launched a coup d’état, with the aim of installing the charismatic Cretan nationalist Eleftherios Venizelos as prime minister and preventing the sons of the king from holding any high commands in the army. Andrea had by then completed his staff college exams but, for their father’s sake, he and his four brothers resigned their posts, leading to three years of demoralizing unemployment.
In 1912, though, he was able to resume his military career when Greece entered the First Balkan War against Turkey, with the aim of expanding Greek territory towards Constantinople and resolving the ownership of Crete. Andrea and his brothers made for Larissa to join the conquering army led by their eldest brother, Crown Prince Constantine, which then swept victoriously through southern and western Macedonia, repeatedly putting the Turks to rout. The campaign not only helped revive the popularity of the Greek princes but also provided Alice with the opportunity for what her biographer Hugo Vickers calls ‘her finest hour’.
Alice was inspired to become a nurse by the example of the grandmother whose name she had been given and more recently by the extraordinary precedent of her aunt Ella, Victoria’s younger sister. Ella was married to Tsar Alexander III’s brother, Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, the reactionary and widely disliked governor-general of Moscow. In February 1905 Serge had been blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb thrown at his carriage in the Kremlin. Hearing the explosion, Ella had rushed to the scene and, kneeling in the snow, calmly helped gather up his scattered remains, though other parts were later retrieved from nearby rooftops.
The murder brought about a profound change in Ella. Shortly afterwards she visited the assassin at the police station and vainly pleaded with him to repent. She withdrew from society, turned increasingly to her adopted Orthodox faith, became a vegetarian, gave away her jewels and furs, and – inspired by her mother’s ‘Alice Nurses’ at Darmstadt – opened a charitable convent where she lived as the abbess, sleeping on a bare wooden bed with no mattress and one hard pillow, and tending patients herself in the hospital wing. She founded a home for consumptives and an orphanage, and during the October Revolution in 1905 stole out of the besieged Kremlin each day to tend to the wounded in hospital.
Alice had seen for herself her aunt’s work when she visited Russia, and it made a deep impression on her. Since first arriving in Athens she had spent much of her time at the charitable Greek School of Embroidery and at the outset of the First Balkan War she had the school make 80,000 garments for the troops and refugees.
Then, leaving her three young daughters – her third, Cecile, had been born in 1911 – she went with Andrea and his brothers to Larissa, where in a burst of manic energy she established a hospital after finding that the army had no plan for one. ‘I myself forced the Military Authorities to fit out an operation room in 24 hours,’ she wrote to her mother.
Realizing it was taking fourteen hours for the wounded to be transported from the front, she then moved her hospital to the recently liberated town of Elassona at the foot of Mount Olympus, requisitioning a school and raiding Turkish houses for mattresses and bedding for 120 men. Alice was in the thick of it, changing bandages on ‘ghastly’ wounds, helping the doctors in ‘fearful operations, hurriedly done in the corridor amongst the dying and wounded waiting for their turn’, with barely any light, the battle still raging all around them, and scarcely any time for sleep between each batch of arrivals. ‘God! What things we saw!’ she wrote. ‘Shattered arms, and legs and heads, such awful sights – and then to have to bandage those dreadful things for three days and three nights. The corridor full of blood, and cast-off bandages knee high.’
She soon expanded her hospital, taking over four more houses and later, as the Greek army advance continued northwards, she moved on to Kozani, where on one occasion she found herself assisting at the amputation of a leg, administering chloroform and preventing the patient from biting his tongue. ‘Once I got over my feeling of disgust, it was very interesting, of course,’ she assured her mother. When the operation was over, the leg lay abandoned on the floor of the ward and Alice suggested someone ought to take it away. Her assistant duly picked it up, ‘wrapped it up in some stuff, put it under her arm and marched out of the hospital to find a place to bury it in. But she never noticed that she left the bloody end uncovered, and as she is as deaf as I, although I shouted after her, she went on unconcerned, and everybody she passed nearly retched with disgust – and, of course, I ended by laughing.’
As the Greeks pressed on through the snowy mountains towards Salonika, the capital of Macedonia, determined to wrest it from Turkish control before the Bulgarians did, Alice remained constantly at or near the front. In each place she passed through she left a well-organized hospital, work for which she would later be personally thanked by prime minister Venizelos.
On 12 November 1912 Venizelos accompanied the king and his heir as they rode in triumph through the streets of Salonika. There was great rejoicing throughout Greece, and Alice and Andrea went to stay with the king, who had installed himself in the Sultan’s villa in the city. In March 1913 Janina, the capital of Epirus, also fell to the Greeks – witnessed by Alice who was again organizing the hospitals – and by the end of the Second Balkan War that summer, which began when the Bulgarians ill-advisedly attacked both Greece and Serbia, Greece had almost doubled in size and population, having gained southern Epirus, Macedonia, Crete and some Aegean islands.
After the tribulations of recent years, these territorial gains were a source of great relief and happiness to King George, and at lunch one day, on 18 March 1913, he announced that he now intended to abdicate on his golden jubilee in October, leaving his newly popular and auspiciously named son Constantine to succeed him. As the lunch party broke up, one of the generals present ventured to warn the king that his habit of strolling freely about the streets was perhaps more dangerous in Salonika than it was in Athens, to which the king replied that he did not wish for such a sermon. Later that afternoon, accompanied by his equerry and two policemen, the king set out for his usual walk to the White Tower. On his way back, as he passed a café, a man came out and shot him dead with a revolver. The assassin turned out to be an insane Greek rather than a Bulgarian or Turkish nationalist as had been feared, and he subsequently leapt to his death from a window while awaiting trial.
King George I’s body was carried by sea to Athens, from where a train took the coffin to Tatoï. Crowds of peasants collected alongside the track and knelt as the train passed.
The British ambassador reported that
Tragic as was the manner of the King’s death, he was at least happy in the moment of it. He had seen the edifice he had laboured to construct for 50 years crowned by the victories of his army under the leadership of his son and successor. He had the assurance that his dynasty was at least firmly seated upon the throne which he had often during his long reign been tempted to abandon in despair. He had seen his aspirations realized beyond his wildest dreams. He will live on in the memories of his people as a martyr to the national cause.
King George’s son was now hailed in some newspapers as Constantine XII, successor to the last Greek ruler of Byzantium who had died during the siege of Constantinople in 1453, although in fact he ascended the throne as Constantine I. The British ambassador deemed him ‘inferior in intelligence to his father, and wanting in his dexterous pliability’, yet at the same time ‘a man of stronger character’ who ‘may well be fitted to deal with the new problems which will arise in the new situation’.
His reign was to prove rather less happy and considerably less enduring.
One of Constantine’s handicaps was that he had married Princess Sophie of Prussia, the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II. On the outbreak of the First World War he was thus torn between loyalty to his wife and a feeling that Germany might win on the one hand, and pressure to join the Allies on the other. His decision to stay neutral placed Greece at odds with both sides and thereafter lowered the Greek royal family in the estimation of the British people.
The outbreak of the European war placed Alice, born a German princess yet with her father serving as Britain’s First Sea Lord, in a similarly awkward position. Louis of Battenberg had been responsible for mobilizing the British fleet prior to the war and on 4 August 1914 he sent the signal: ‘Admiralty to All Ships. Commence hostilities against Germany.’
By then he had served for forty-six years in the Royal Navy, yet his accent and mannerisms were still faintly German, and he kept German staff in his household. Within the navy, he was acknowledged as an exceptional sea officer and Fleet Commander, and a kind and courtly man; however, his insistence that there were certain things that were done more efficiently in his country of birth inevitably aroused hostility towards him.
Following the outbreak of war, the British popular press whipped up a wave of scurrilous anti-German paranoia, during which anyone or anything deemed to be of German origin was liable to come under attack. Shop windows were smashed, dachshunds were kicked in the street and innocent people with Teutonic-sounding names were arrested and imprisoned without trial. When two German cruisers mysteriously evaded a British force in the eastern Mediterranean and made it to Constantinople, it was whispered that a British admiral must have assisted them and that Louis Battenberg was a German spy. Of course, George V, too, had a German name and connections, and the wholeheartedness of his commitment to the Allied cause also came under scrutiny. On one occasion, Lord Kitchener ‘had solemnly to assure the Cabinet that lights seen flashing over Sandringham during a German air sortie were caused by the car of the rector returning home after dinner’.
Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, attempted to make light of all the xenophobic hysteria, and when told off for drinking hock, he responded: ‘I am interning it.’
Nevertheless, he worried about the effect of all the attacks on his First Sea Lord’s powers of concentration, and soon decided that the country’s best interests would be served by replacing Louis with the more dynamic Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher.
It was with some relief, therefore, that he accepted Louis’ resignation on 29 October 1914, even though it deprived the Royal Navy of one of its shrewdest strategic brains.
The whole episode was a great tragedy for Louis. ‘I feel for him deeply,’ wrote George V in his diary, ‘there is no more loyal man in the country.’
However, Battenberg’s younger son, also called Louis but known in the family as Dickie, then a fourteen-year-old naval cadet at Osborne, casually remarked to a contemporary: ‘It doesn’t really matter. Of course I shall take his place.’
His vow to avenge the family’s humiliation would propel him on a career path even more remarkable than that of his father.
During the early part of the First World War, Andrea was stationed at Salonika, but in 1916 his brother King Constantine sent him on a diplomatic mission to London and Paris to assure the Allies that Greece was not on the German side. Alice remained mostly in Athens, looking after their four daughters. The youngest of these, Sophie, had been born in 1914 and was always known in the family as Tiny, although she grew to be the tallest of the four sisters. Shortly after her birth her teenage uncle Dickie had written to his mother, Victoria: ‘Please congratulate Alice from me, but it was silly not to have a boy for once in a way.’
The political situation in Greece remained fraught throughout the war. Venizelos favoured siding with the Allies, thinking that they would win and be more sympathetic towards Greece’s remaining territorial ambitions. He also considered the Allies’ superior naval power vital to the protection of his maritime country. In 1916 he staged a coup and established a rival government in Salonika, which promptly declared war on Germany. When King Constantine continued to insist on Greek neutrality, the Allied fleet bombarded Athens.
Alice was at the embroidery school at the time and drove home ‘through a rain of bullets’ to find one of the nursery windows shattered by a shell. She quickly took her children down to the palace cellar, where Constantine’s queen Sophie was also sheltering.
During the subsequent blockade they both worked in soup kitchens. Eventually, in June 1917, Constantine bowed to Allied demands that he leave the country, a humiliating finale to a reign that had begun with such high hopes.
While the banished king made his way to Switzerland accompanied by his eldest son, Crown Prince George, whom the Allies also considered too pro-German, he was succeeded by his second son, Alexander. The other brothers, including Andrea, were soon asked to follow Constantine into exile, and Andrea and Alice were thus condemned to another spell of kicking their heels, this time at a hotel in St Moritz and later in Rome.
Alice’s parents in England, meanwhile, suffered further upheavals of their own. In the summer of 1917 George V decided to camouflage the royal family’s Germanic associations by renaming his dynasty the House of Windsor. Absurdly, no one in Britain seemed able to agree on what the previous name was, although the Kaiser declared that he was looking forward to attending a production of ‘The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ – one of his only recorded jokes. The king accompanied his change of name with a request that other members of the royal family relinquish all of their German names and styles and titles.
Alice’s father, His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg, thus found himself relegated to being the Marquess of Milford Haven, while his family name was translated into English as Mountbatten. He admitted to finding the change ‘a terrible break with one’s past’
and while staying with his elder son Georgie when his new title was announced, he wrote sadly in the visitors’ book: ‘Arrived Prince Jekyll, Departed Lord Hyde’.
Yet Louis’ predicament was mild compared with the branch of his family in Russia, where the tsar had been forced to abdicate following the outbreak of revolution in March 1917. George V, the tsar’s first cousin, briefly considered giving him sanctuary but then had second thoughts, fearful that his apparent endorsement of the old tsarist regime would antagonize Russia’s new rulers, who remained Britain’s allies in the war.
The offer of asylum was thus withdrawn.
In April 1918 the tsar and tsarina (Alice’s aunt Alix, who had become deeply unpopular in Russia due to her perceived Germanic aloofness and devotion to Rasputin) and their teenage children were taken to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, where three months later they were executed. Alice’s other aunt, Ella, had carried on with her selfless work, refusing all offers of asylum from abroad. In 1918 she, too, was arrested by Lenin’s secret police and taken with other members of the imperial family and their retainers to the mining town of Alapayevsk, one hundred miles from Ekaterinburg. One night they were woken up and told to get dressed. They were then blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs before being driven to the edge of a mine shaft, where they were thrown in. They were heard saying prayers until, it seems, they were eventually killed by a combination of hand grenades and burning brushwood. The martyrdom of Ella in particular (she was later recognized as a saint) would have a profound influence on the future course of Alice’s life – and by extension that of Prince Philip.
The new Greek king, Alexander, had reigned for only three years when, in October 1920, he was out walking his wolfhound, Fritz, in the garden at Tatoï and the dog was attacked by a tame Spanish monkey. While trying to release the monkey from Fritz’s teeth, the king was attacked by its mate and severely bitten in the leg. The wound was quickly cleaned and dressed but after two days a fever set in. Three weeks after that the king died from blood poisoning, aged twenty-six, leaving a young and beautiful widow, Aspasia, who was five months pregnant with their daughter Alexandra, Philip’s cousin, childhood friend and future biographer.
Winston Churchill later remarked that it was perhaps no exaggeration to say that ‘a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite’ – an allusion to Greece’s subsequent military campaign in Turkey, which was led by Alexander’s father Constantine, who returned to the throne after his son’s death. In the lead-up to this latest adventure, fearing Italian encroachment in the region, the Allies had agreed to the landing of Greek troops in Smyrna (now Izmir, on the west coast of Turkey), the wealthiest of Ottoman cities and the embodiment of that empire’s reputation for cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance. Smyrna had more Greek inhabitants than Athens and had been a long-cherished objective of Greek nationalists. In June 1920 the Greeks had advanced further into Turkish territory and in August, under the Treaty of Sèvres, they had gained Thrace while their administration of Smyrna and its hinterland had been extended for a further five years – after which the region was to be annexed if the local parliament so decided. Venizelos’s supporters boasted of having created a Greece of ‘the two continents and of the five seas’.
After King Alexander’s death, his younger brother Paul was invited by Venizelos to assume the throne, but he refused on the grounds that his father and elder brother had never renounced their prior rights. Venizelos then called a general election in November 1920 in which he offered the Greek people the freedom to vote for the restoration to the throne of Alexander’s father, the exiled King Constantine. To the amazement and dismay of virtually all foreign observers they did so, decisively removing Venizelos and his government from office in the process.
Andrea, by now balding and wearing a monocle, was at last able to return to Greece from Rome with his family. On arrival at Phaleron Bay he and his brother Christopher were ‘borne on the shoulders of the populace, frenzied with joy’ all the way to Athens, so Alice recorded, and he was then required to make a speech from the balcony of the royal palace ‘to the vast crowds gathered below’.
A month later, on 19 December, King Constantine returned from exile to the throne amid much Greek rejoicing – although the Allies refused to recognize him.
Having previously criticized the campaign in Turkey, once in power it soon became clear that the new royalist government now planned to continue it with a spectacular offensive eastwards from occupied Smyrna towards the towns of Kutahya and Eski Shehir in the heart of Anatolia. ‘The morale of the army, its spirit and its certainty of success are high,’ wrote King Constantine. ‘God grant that we may not suffer disappointment! It will be a very hard struggle, which will cost us enormous sacrifices; but what a triumph if we win!’
Andrea returned to the Greek army in the rank of major general and after years of depressing inactivity he was raring to go.
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Philip Eade
‘The narrative is as suspenseful as any thriller. Truly, an excellent read’ Lynn Barber, Sunday TimesMarried for almost seventy years to the most famous woman in the world, Prince Philip is the longest-serving royal consort in British history. Yet his origins have remained curiously shrouded in obscurity.In the first book to focus exclusively on his life before the coronation, acclaimed biographer Philip Eade uncovers the extraordinary story of the prince’s turbulent upbringing in Greece, France and Nazi Germany, during which his mother spent five years in a secure psychiatric clinic and his father left him to be brought up by his Mountbatten relations in England just when he needed him most.Remarkably the young prince emerged from this unsettled background a character of singular vitality and dash – self-confident, capable, famously opinionated and devastatingly handsome. Girls fell at his feet, and the princess who was to become his wife was smitten from the age of thirteen.Yet alongside the considerable charm and intelligence, the prince was also prone to volcanic outbursts and to putting his foot in it. Detractors perceived in his behaviour emotional shortcomings, a legacy of his traumatic childhood, which would have profound consequences for his family and the future of the monarchy.Published to coincide with the prince’s ninetieth birthday and containing new material from interviews, archives and film footage, this revelatory biography is the most complete and compelling account yet of his storm-tossed early life.
Philip Eade
Young Prince Philip
His Turbulent Early Life
To my sisters Fiona, Belinda and Jo
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
1 Kings of Greece
2 House of Battenberg
3 Boy’s Own Story
4 Family in Flight
5 Orphan Child
6 Prep School Days
7 Dodging the Hitler Youth
8 Off to Gordonstoun
9 Blow after Blow
10 The Man with the Plan
11 A Good War
12 Osla and Lilibet
13 Steady on, Dickie
14 Nothing Ventured …
15 True Brit
16 Royal Wedding
17 Duke of Hazards
18 Their Happiest Time
19 Second Fiddle
20 Oh, the Future!
21 Her Liege Man
Photographic Insert (#ua391fc71-ec10-5c86-b0a2-85dfa31016da)
Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Philip Eade
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The idea for this biography came a little unexpectedly from a book I briefly toyed with writing about prominent ufologists in the period just after the Second World War. In the course of cobbling together a proposal to try and persuade my sceptical agent, I was struck by the revelation in Francis Wheen’s book How Mumbo Conquered the World that Prince Philip’s equerry once went off at the prince’s bidding to meet an extraterrestrial humanoid at a house in Ealing. The equerry in question, Sir Peter Horsley, had been on the prince’s staff from 1952 until 1955, before climbing to great heights in the RAF. ‘Oh God,’ sighed an official at the Ministry of Defence when Horsley’s memoirs came out in 1997, ‘how unfortunate that the public will learn that the man who had his finger on the button of Strike Command was seeing little green men.’
For better or worse, the public also learned that, for several years in the early 1950s, Prince Philip had enthusiastically swapped UFO stories with his uncle Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, a fellow subscriber to the Flying Saucer Review, and kept himself abreast of developments in the field. According to Horsley, ‘Prince Philip was open to the immense possibilities leading to space exploration, while at the same time not discounting that, just as we were on the fringe of breaking into space, so older civilizations in the universe might already have done so’. Horsley also recalled that the prince ‘agreed that I could investigate the more credible reports provided that I kept it all in perspective and did not involve his office in any kind of publicity or sponsorship’. A number of witnesses were invited to Buckingham Palace to discuss their experiences, partly, as Horsley later explained, to ‘put them on the spot’ and to test their honesty ‘in the presence of royalty, a method as effective as any truth serum’.
This was all intriguing news to me, yet the more I read about Prince Philip, the more it became apparent that his interest in flying saucers was very far from being the most intriguing thing about him. He is, after all, famously revered as a living god by the islanders of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. More than anything, though, I was drawn to the remarkable story of his early life, which seemed to be overflowing with drama and colour – and yet there did not seem to be a particularly full or dispassionate written account of it.
I am extremely grateful to everyone who helped me in various ways with this book. At Buckingham Palace, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Sir Brian McGrath, Prince Philip’s extra equerry. While Sir Brian never pretended that my project was especially welcome, neither was he in the least bit obstructive. On the contrary, he was very helpful in enabling interviews with Prince Philip’s friends and relations. Both he and Dame Anne Griffiths, Prince Philip’s librarian and archivist, also helped with access to various papers at Buckingham Palace, the Royal Archives and the Hesse State Archives in Darmstadt, and took the trouble to read an early draft of my manuscript and suggest corrections of fact and interpretation. It should be stressed, however, that this biography is in no sense approved or authorized, and I was therefore under no obligation to omit things and incidents that might be deemed discreditable to Prince Philip or the royal family. It was never my intention to be sniping or mean-spirited. However, I knew that for the portrait to be credible to neutral readers, some of the foibles, or perceived foibles, needed to be given an airing alongside Prince Philip’s finer qualities. I am equally confident that readers will respond more sympathetically towards him in consequence. I accept full responsibility for any errors there may be in the final version.
I am extremely grateful to all those who agreed to talk to (or correspond with) me about various aspects of Prince Philip’s early life, including, in no particular order, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Lady Pamela Hicks, Lady (Myra) Butter, Philip Ziegler, Kenneth Rose, The Hon. Mrs Janie Spring, Captain North Dalrymple-Hamilton, Lord Gainford, The Hon. Mrs Sarah Baring, The Dowager Countess of Cromer, Lady Macmillan, Lady Margaret Stirling-Aird, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, The Hon. Mrs (Oliver) Dawnay, Robin Dalton, Daphne Davie (née Brock), Major General David Alexander, Air Vice-Marshal Sir John Severne, Patrick Kidner, Sir Jeremy Chance, Clive Stewart-Lockhart, Landgrave Moritz of Hesse, Prince and Princess Ludwig of Baden, Professor Max Boisot, Peter Saunders, Leading Signalman Ted Longshaw, Lester May, Jimmy Taylor, John Wynne and the late Lord (Aubrey) Buxton.
Among the archivists who helped me, I am grateful to Pamela Clark at the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle; Professor Chris Woolgar, Archivist of the Mountbatten Papers at the University of Southampton; Professor Echart G. Franz at the Hesse State Archives in Darmstadt; Michael Churchill at Cheam; Michael Meister and Sophie Weidlich at Schule Schloss Salem; Louise Harvey at Gordonstoun; the staff of the National Archives at Kew in London; the staff of Churchill College Archives in Cambridge; the staff of the British Library; the staff of the newspaper library at Colindale, London; and the staff of the Telegraph newspaper library. I am also extremely grateful to the staff of the London Library, where the majority of this book was written.
I am greatly indebted to various published sources. Among these, Hugo Vickers’s scrupulously researched authorized biography of Prince Philip’s mother, Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, was an invaluable source of otherwise unavailable family information and letters, many fragments of which I have cited.
Among the biographies of Prince Philip himself, those that I found most useful were by Basil Boothroyd (Philip: An Informal Biography), Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia (Prince Philip: A Family Portrait), Tim Heald (The Duke: A Portrait of Prince Philip) and Gyles Brandreth (Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage). I also relied heavily on several of Philip Ziegler’s books, principally his outstanding biography Mountbatten, and on the excellent royal biographies by Sarah Bradford (George VI and Elizabeth), Ben Pimlott (The Queen), Robert Lacey (Majesty and Royal), and William Shawcross (Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother). Other particularly useful books included Jonathan Petropoulos’s Royals and the Reich, a study of the relationship between the Hesse family and the Nazi regime, and Graham Turner’s Elizabeth: The Woman and the Queen.
My literary agent, Caroline Dawnay, was, as ever, a constant source of sound advice, excellent ideas and much needed encouragement. I was extremely fortunate to have as my editor at Harper Press Martin Redfern, who was a pleasure to work with and made numerous editorial suggestions which greatly improved the book. My thanks, too, to Richard Collins, for his painstaking copy editing, to Sarah Hopper, for her very willing and resourceful picture research, and to Christopher Phipps, for his exemplary index. I am particularly grateful also to Victoria Lane, who read and edited an early draft of the first half of the book, and did much to make it better, and to Robert Gray, who very generously agreed to read the whole manuscript, in the course of which he tightened a great many of my loose sentences and made countless perceptive comments.
Many thanks, too, to Oliver James, Robert Hardman, Richard Davenport-Hines, David Profumo, Abigail Napp, Anne de Courcy, Francis Wheen, Richard Ingrams, Lucy Cavendish, Annabel Price, Saffron Rainey, Violet Hudson, Kate Hubbard, Matthew Bell, James Owen, James Kidner, Jane Stewart-Lockhart, Richard Mead, Richard Rycroft, Miranda Seymour, Alex von Tunzelmann, Fiammetta Rocco, Chelsea Renton, David Ford, Dan Renton, Kim Reczek, Zara D’Abo, Tom Faulkner, Epoh Beech, Rodolf de Salis, John Lloyd, Giles Milton, John McNally, Joachim von Halasz, Eloise Moody, Stephen Birmingham, Kitty Kelley, Michael Bloch, John Parker, Gyles Brandreth, Janie Lewis, Olivia Hunt, Helen Ellis, Minna Fry, Nicky and Jasmine Dunne, Fiona and Euan McAlpine, Belinda and Patrick Macaskie, Jo and Richard Wimbush, my mother and father, and anyone else I may have forgotten to mention.
PROLOGUE
Autumn 1937
At around noon on 16 November 1937, Prince Philip’s heavily pregnant sister Cecile set off on the short drive through the woods from the Hesse family’s old hunting box at Wolfsgarten to Frankfurt aerodrome in order to fly to London for a family wedding. With her were her husband, George Donatus, or ‘Don’, who had recently succeeded his father as the Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, his widowed mother, the Dowager Grand Duchess, their two young sons, aged six and four, who were due to be pages, a lady-in-waiting and the best man.
The only member of the Grand Ducal family left behind at home was their baby daughter Johanna, who was too young to go to the wedding.
By the mid-1930s, air travel had become sufficiently popular for Bradshaw’s to begin publishing its monthly International Air Guide, looking much like a train timetable although unashamedly aimed at the travelling elite, with advertisements only for luxury hotels. However, it was still rare compared with travel by sea or rail and most Europeans considered it too risky and unpredictable, particularly in the high winds and dense fogs of late autumn. In December 1935, fourteen-year-old Philip’s grandmother had pleaded in vain with him before one of his frequent continental trips to visit relations: ‘This time I really think you had better not fly across, as it is such a stormy time of the year.’
Philip’s sister Cecile shared their grandmother’s misgivings. She was reputedly so terrified of aeroplanes that she always wore black when she flew. However, Don Hesse was a dedicated and fearless flyer, like his young brother-in-law, and with an aerodrome so close to home, he was not one to be put off by the potential hazards.
They took off just before two o’clock in bright sunshine in a three-engine Junkers monoplane operated by the Belgian airline Sabena and captained by one of its most experienced airmen, Tony Lambotte, the personal friend and pilot of King Leopold III, assisted by an engineer, wireless operator and mechanic. The plane had been scheduled to land en route near Brussels, but thick fog had swept quickly in from the North Sea and so they were instructed by wireless to proceed instead to Steene aerodrome on the coast near Ostend. There, too, fog had reduced visibility to a few yards, yet the pilot nevertheless went ahead with his descent, flying blind. The aerodrome staff fired three rockets to help him find his way, but only the first one worked.
An eyewitness later described having seen the aeroplane coming down out of the fog and hitting the top of a brickworks’ chimney, 150ft high, ‘at about 100 miles an hour. One wing and one of the engines broke off, and both crashed through the roof of the works. The remainder of the aeroplane turned over and crashed to the ground in the brickfield about 50 yards further on, where it at once burst into flames.’
Fire engines and ambulances raced to the scene but they could not get near the burning wreckage until there was no hope of there being any survivors. Additional news from Ostend later added a poignant footnote to the tragedy. Firemen sifting through the charred wreckage of the plane had stumbled upon the remains of an infant, prematurely delivered when the plane crashed, lying beside the crumpled body of Cecile.
The discovery gave rise to the theory that the pilot had only attempted to land after he became aware that the Grand Duchess had begun to give birth.
At Gordonstoun School in Morayshire it fell to the German émigré headmaster Kurt Hahn to break the terrible news to sixteen-year-old Philip, who would never forget the ‘profound shock’ with which he heard what had happened to his sister and her family.
Even before this latest tragedy, the young prince had suffered more than his share of blows during his short life and, perhaps thus fortified, he ‘did not break down’, so his headmaster later recorded. ‘His sorrow was that of a man.’
The next week, Philip travelled alone to Germany for the funeral at Darmstadt, the Hesse family’s home town south of Frankfurt. As the coffins were borne through streets festooned with swastikas, he cut a distinctly forlorn figure walking behind them in his civilian dark suit and overcoat, his white-blond hair standing out against the surrounding dark military greatcoats. Beside him marched his surviving brothers-in-law – Prince Christoph of Hesse, the husband of Philip’s youngest sister Sophie, the most conspicuous in his SS garb; and Christoph’s brother Prince Philipp of Hesse walking alongside in an SA brown shirt. Philip’s uncle Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten followed just behind in British naval dress.
The streets of Darmstadt were lined with detachments of soldiers in Nazi uniforms and, as the procession passed, many in the crowd raised their outstretched arms in a full ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting
– a gesture that Philip had become accustomed to seeing as a schoolboy in Nazi Germany four years earlier and on regular visits there ever since. Don and Cecile had recently joined the Nazi party themselves. Hitler and Goebbels had sent messages of sympathy; Goering attended the funeral in person.
This strange and desperately sad occasion was also the first time that Philip’s parents had seen each other since 1931, when his mother, who had been born deaf, had been committed to a secure psychiatric sanatorium after suffering a nervous breakdown. Shortly afterwards his father had closed down the family home near Paris and taken himself off to live in the South of France, leaving ten-year-old Philip to be brought up in Britain by his wife’s family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens. For almost five years he had heard nothing from his mother and he had become reacquainted with her only shortly before the disaster that befell Cecile.
Almost exactly a decade after the tragedy, Prince Philip married the most eligible young woman in the world, heir to the British throne. As he approaches his ninetieth birthday – two years after surpassing the record of George III’s Queen Charlotte as the longest-serving consort in British history – still walking dutifully a pace or two behind his wife, emitting the odd robust remark, it is easy to forget what a turbulent time he had when he was younger.
ONE
Kings of Greece
Although he has been married for more than sixty years to the most enduringly famous woman in the world, Prince Philip’s own origins have remained strangely shrouded in obscurity. ‘I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father,’ he remarked ruefully in the 1970s. ‘Most people think that Dickie [Mountbatten] is my father anyway.’
The easiest way of understanding Prince Philip’s paternal ancestry is to start with his grandfather, King George I of Greece. A dashing figure, seen in photographs sporting a range of spectacular moustaches, King George was born Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg in 1845 in Copenhagen, the younger son of an army officer whose meagre pay meant that his children grew up in comparative poverty. Their home, the Yellow Palace, was not especially palatial, with a front door that led straight on to the pavement,
their lifestyle scarcely regal, with William’s mother doing much of the housework and his sisters sharing a room and making their own clothes. As a family, the Glücksburgs were loud and frivolous, informal and uncultured, apt to ‘make funny noises and yell if they saw anyone trying to write a letter’.
They were also distinctly unspoilt and unpretentious, yet within a very short space of time they had ‘colonised royal Europe’, as one chronicler put it.
In 1852, William’s father was unexpectedly named as heir to the Danish throne, by virtue of being a godson and distant kinsman of the childless king, although for the time being this made no difference to his income and the family still struggled to make ends meet.
However, their status changed dramatically in 1863, when, within a year, the father succeeded as King Christian IX of Denmark, William’s sister Alexandra married the Prince of Wales, destined to become King Edward VII, and a delegation from Greece came and asked seventeen-year-old William to be their king. Another sister, Dagmar, would shortly marry the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia, while yet another, Thyra, married the heir to the throne of Hanover – although that was soon dissolved by Prussia after the 1866 Anglo-Prussian war. Within the next half-century, the descendants of Christian IX would occupy no fewer than nine European thrones.
Only the descendants of Queen Victoria were more widely spread.
King George I, as William became on his accession, later maintained that he had accepted the Greek throne with great reluctance, since it meant abandoning his chosen naval career to go and rule a far-off country with a turbulent people and a language he did not speak.
Greece had only recently broken free from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the long and bloody war of independence that had claimed the life of Lord Byron among countless others. The new country – unstable, poor and less than half the size of what it was to become during George’s reign – was formally recognized by the London Protocol of 1830, in which the protecting powers, France, Great Britain and Russia, stipulated that a hereditary sovereign should be chosen from outside the country to lessen the chances of internal disputes. In 1833 a young Bavarian prince called Otto had arrived in a British frigate to fill this vacancy, but his tactless and despotic rule caused countless insurrections. In 1862 he was deposed in a bloodless revolution and left Greece just as he had arrived, in a British warship.
Many Greek people had wanted to have as his successor Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, whose portrait was carried through the streets of Athens by a cheering mob. But Alfred was ineligible as a prince of one of the protecting powers; and besides, his mother did not like the idea. Several alternatives were suggested before eventually they settled on the young Danish prince as the least contentious candidate.
When he first arrived in Greece, he was still not yet eighteen and as he took the oath to the new constitution at the national assembly, the British ambassador was moved by ‘the sight of this slight, delicate stripling, standing alone amidst a crowd of callous, unscrupulous politicians, many of whom had been steeped to the lips in treason, and swearing to observe, as he has so faithfully done, the most unworkable of charters, from which nearly every safeguard had been studiously eliminated’.
Athens then was no more than a collection of villages, with a combined population of about 45,000, and the young king developed an endearing habit of walking alone through the streets, stopping every now and then to talk to passers-by. So determined was he to master the Greek language and customs that over the next four years he never left the country, travelling instead to all corners of his realm by ship, carriage, mule and on foot.
While he never entirely lost his slight Danish accent, King George’s enthusiasm and lack of affectation were greatly appreciated by the Greek people. On Monday mornings, he was available to any of his subjects who wanted to come and air their grievances. He also gave an audience to any foreigner who requested one, provided they put on dress-clothes and white tie. The king tended to stand throughout these interviews and one of those who paid a visit, E. F. Benson, was disconcerted by his habit of continuously rising on his toes and rocking back on his heels. Benson found this ‘as infectious as yawning’ and it was only with the greatest effort that he could prevent himself from following the royal example. Aspirational American ladies began flocking to Athens because, as one of them remarked, ‘The royal family of Greece is the easiest royal family to become acquainted with’.
Affable and approachable the young King George may have been, but he still had to learn to stand up for himself against his wily ministers. Shortly after his arrival, a story was told of one cabinet meeting at which the boy king stood up and went over to a map to illustrate a point he was making. When he returned to his seat he noticed that his watch was missing. He looked around the table: ‘Will whoever has my watch please return it?’ he demanded. His ministers stared blankly back at him. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ the king continued, ‘I’m not accustomed to this type of joke. I’d like to have my watch back.’ Still nobody spoke. Adopting a sterner tone, the king announced that he was going to put out the light and count to sixty. ‘If I find the watch again on the table, the incident will be closed,’ he said. In the darkness he called the seconds out loud. When he turned the lights back on his silver inkstand had vanished as well.
Apart from dealing with his ministers and frequent changes of government (forty-two in the first twenty-five years of his reign), he also had to re-establish the rather ramshackle court, train his own aides-de-camp, butlers, footmen and so forth, and set the appropriate tone, although to begin with his youthful demeanour made it ‘sometimes difficult for his daily companions to maintain the respectful reserve and gravity due to a royal station’.
The young king was also regularly reminded by his counsellors of his dynastic responsibilities, to marry and produce a son born on Greek soil, and so in 1867, aged twenty-one, he visited his sister in Russia, where he hoped to find a wife.
Tsar Alexander II had persuaded George that his was the only country where he would find a girl with the requisite combination of royal breeding and Orthodox faith. The two-month trip would also enable him to see how the vast empire was run. He lost no time as regards his primary purpose and on a visit to the tsar’s younger brother Constantine at Pavlovsk he promptly proposed to the Grand Duke’s fifteen-year-old daughter Olga, a shy and pretty girl with beautiful dark eyes, whom Queen Victoria had thought might do rather well for her son Alfred.
Engaged within a week of meeting, they were married shortly after her sixteenth birthday in an elaborate five-day ceremony at the Winter Palace.
For her arrival in Athens, Queen Olga thoughtfully wore a dress in the Greek national colours of blue and white which delighted the huge crowd and her ‘fresh young beauty’ soon won the hearts of her subjects.
With her came a Russian lady-in-waiting, a governess and a trunk full of dolls and teddy bears to complete the entourage. At times overwhelmed and frightened by the reception she received, the young queen was once found hiding beneath the palace staircase ‘hugging her favourite Russian stuffed bear, and weeping bitterly’.
She never did entirely overcome her homesickness – whenever a Russian ship docked at Piraeus, she could scarcely keep away from it – but the marriage was extremely successful and as queen she won the enduring love of the Greek people.
Olga’s first child, a son, was born barely nine months after the wedding and named Constantine after the last emperor of Byzantine Greece, an augury which prompted much rejoicing. She went on to have a further seven children, three girls (one of whom survived only three months) and four more boys. Philip’s father, Andrew, known as Andrea, was the last but one, born in 1882 at Tatoï, the royal family’s country estate, some thirty miles north of Athens. He was premature and so tiny that he spent his first few days in a cigar box being fed with a toothpick,
however after being wet-nursed by a ‘pleasant-looking peasant from the island of Andros, called Athena’,
he eventually grew into a tall and athletic figure, ‘like a thoroughbred horse’ according to Philip’s aunt Marie Bonaparte.
By common consent he was the most handsome of the king’s sons. It was from him that Philip inherited his high-domed forehead, his ‘fine nose and lips and the narrow Mountbatten eyes’ coming from his mother.
Andrea grew up with his brothers and sisters at the gaunt royal palace which had been built by King Otto on a hill overlooking old Athens and was extensively ransacked after his departure. Nowadays used as the Greek parliament, during Andrea’s childhood it was an ‘excessively uncomfortable’ family home, so his younger brother Christopher recalled, with only one bathroom where the taps emitted a dismal trickle of water and the odd defunct cockroach.
As a boy, Andrea suffered at least one bout of typhoid, presumed to have been caught from the palace drains.
Winters were especially spartan, with cold winds whistling through the long, dim galleries and countless unused rooms. King George seems to have grown sterner with fatherhood and whatever the weather bade his sons get up at six each morning for a cold bath and then lessons at 6.30 sharp. His sister Alexandra, who came to visit in 1893, when Andrea was eleven, noted that the king was ‘rather tyrannical in the family’ and failed to take his children into his confidence even when they grew up, which embittered them towards him.
However, he would occasionally unbend to lead bicycling or roller-skating processions around the palace with the whole family following in order of age.
He told his children: ‘You must never forget that you are foreigners in this country, but you must make them [the Greek people] forget it.’
The eldest children spoke Greek to each other at home and English to their parents, who in turn conversed in German. Andrea was always more Greek than any of his siblings and as a boy flatly refused to speak any other language.
Although George liked discipline and uniforms, he was in other respects a relatively down-to-earth monarch, and the atmosphere at his court was generally far more relaxed than elsewhere in Europe. The princes and princesses were known by their Christian names alone and often hailed as such in the street. They all grew up with a love of practical jokes. ‘Anything could happen when you got a few of them together,’ according to Philip. ‘It was like the Marx brothers.’
Court balls were notably democratic. A foreign guest once hired a carriage to drive him to the palace for one of these parties, only for his coachman to stipulate: ‘Do you mind going rather early, because I’m going there myself and shall have to go home and change?’ The foreign gentleman laughed at what he thought was a rather good joke; but later in the evening, there was his driver, resplendent in evening clothes, dancing with the wife of a minister.
There was a fairy-tale quality to the whole set-up. When E. F. Benson visited in 1893 he recorded that on Sunday afternoons a small compartment was often reserved on the steam tram that ran between Athens and the coast at Phaleron; when it stopped opposite the palace, the king and his family would emerge to the sound of a bugler. If they failed to come at once, the driver would impatiently touch the whistle. Benson found Greece to be an
astonishing little kingdom, the like of which, outside pure fiction, will never again exist in Europe … its army dressed in Albanian costume (embroidered jacket, fustinella, like a ballet skirt, fez, white gaiters, red shoes with tassels on the toes like the seeds of dandelions), its fleet of three small cruisers, its national assembly of bawling Levantines and its boot-blacks called Agamemnon and Thucydides, was precisely like the fabulous kingdom of Paflagonia in The Rose and the Ring, or some Gilbertian realm of light opera.
Every other summer the family would travel to Denmark, where King Christian IX and his wife Queen Louise had their descendants to stay en masse at the vast Fredensborg Palace. With all the court attendants and personal servants, the house parties numbered up to three hundred, and apart from the Greek royal family, included the Prince and Princess of Wales and Tsar Alexander III and Tsarina Marie Feodorovna (as King George’s sister Dagmar had now become). Court etiquette was dispensed with during the day, when the tsar would take the children off to catch tadpoles or steal apples, but for dinner they all entered the big hall in a long procession arm in arm, preceded by the tsar, who offered his arm to Queen Louise, and the rest following according to rank.
There were also regular trips to Russia – across the Black Sea to Sebastopol where the luxurious imperial train awaited – and to Corfu, one of the Ionian islands given to Greece by Britain on George’s accession to the throne, and where the municipality had presented the new king with a villa, Mon Repos, on a promontory just to the south of Corfu Town. But most of their time away from Athens was spent at Tatoï, Andrea’s birthplace, the royal estate of 40,000 acres in the pine-scented foothills of Mount Parnés, high enough to be much cooler than the capital. After buying Tatoï in 1871, King George had established a vineyard to produce an alternative to the pine-infused retsina, which he detested, and a butter-making dairy farm with a range of Danish-style stone buildings. For those who were not well disposed towards their imported monarch there was evidence at Tatoï that he had not embraced his adopted country quite as wholeheartedly as he liked to make out.
By 1886, the king had replaced the original small villa with a replica of a hideous Victorian-style house that stood in the grounds of his wife’s family home, Pavlovsk, and so Tatoï became the one place where Queen Olga never felt homesick; she celebrated her birthday there each year with a big party for all the estate workers. The family all grew to love Tatoï and most of them, including Andrea, are buried in the wooded cemetery there. But their white marble graves are seldom visited nowadays. Since 1967, when the last Greek king, Constantine II, went into exile in Surrey, the estate has become overgrown and the buildings are now mostly ruins. A few picnic tables scattered about the park hint at the symbolic gesture of giving Tatoï to the republican Greek people of today, but few visitors come here now and if you ask for directions from Athens, you are almost guaranteed to get a blank look.
Andrea’s childhood was on the whole steady, but there were also events of great sadness. The first of these occurred when he was nine, when his sister Alexandra died while giving birth to her son, Dimitri, three years after her marriage to Grand Duke Paul of Russia. The whole family, including Andrea, travelled to Moscow, where the young Grand Duchess lay in state in a special room at the station, and then on to St Petersburg for the funeral. One of Andrea’s elder brothers later recalled that it was ‘all so unexpected and awful that the shock and sorrow overpowered us all’.
King George, who doted on his daughter, never got over it.
For all the king’s personal popularity, Greece remained a turbulent and violent country, and he survived several assassination attempts. In 1898, while out driving with his daughter Marie – later Grand Duchess George of Russia – his carriage was attacked by two men who opened fire with rifles at close range. Marie had a red bow in her hat which her father thought would make her an easy target for them ‘so he quickly stood up,’ she recalled, ‘put his hand on my neck and forced me down. With his other hand he menaced them with his walking stick.’ Both horses were hit and slightly wounded and a footman was injured in the leg; however the king and his daughter were miraculously unscathed.
When he was fourteen, Andrea began attending classes twice a week at the military college at Athens, where he was drilled by German officers and became quite friendly with the future dictator Theodore Pangalos,
an association that may later have saved his life. From the age of seventeen, he was privately tutored by another future revolutionary, Major Panayotis Danglis, who privately noted that his new charge was tall, quick and intelligent – and short-sighted.
The king was forever urging Danglis to increase Andrea’s hours of tuition, and when the family went on holiday to Corfu in the spring of 1900 Andrea was made to stay in and attend to his military studies rather than go on many of the picnics and excursions.
In 1902, aged twenty, Andrea was examined by a panel that included his father, his elder brothers, the prime minister, the archbishop, the war minister and half the teaching staff of the military academy. The king had been keen to ensure that the test was as rigorous as it could be, but they were unanimous in passing Andrea and he was duly commissioned as a subaltern in the cavalry. Shortly after this he met the beautiful seventeen-year-old Princess Alice of Battenberg, the girl who was to become his wife.
TWO
House of Battenberg
The House of Battenberg to which Alice belonged was slightly older than the House of Greece and equally romantic in its origins. Alice’s grandfather was Prince Alexander of Hesse, officially the third son of the famously ugly Grand Duke Louis II of Hesse and by Rhine but widely assumed to have been sired by the Grand Duchess’s handsome chamberlain, Baron Augustus Senarclens von Grancy, with whom the duchess had been openly living for three years by the time Alexander was born in 1823.
Alexander’s younger sister Marie, who was thought to have the same biological father, went on to marry the future Tsar Alexander II. Hence, at the age of eighteen, Alexander joined the tsar’s imperial army as a colonel, and was later promoted to major general when his sister produced an heir. However, his career faltered after he fell in love with Marie’s Polish lady-in-waiting, Julie Hauke, who, although a countess, was deemed to be unacceptably beneath his rank.
Julie became pregnant and Alexander married her, with the result that he was banished from Russia. His Hessian family was equally dismayed by the match but his brother, Louis III, nevertheless revived the dormant title of Battenberg – a small town in the north of the Grand Duchy – for Julie, with the quality of countess, later raised to princess. Alexander remained a prince but it was stressed that no child of their morganatic marriage would have a claim to the Hessian throne.
Their eldest son was Alice’s father, Prince Louis of Battenberg. From an early age Louis was determined to depart from the Hessian soldiering tradition and become a sailor, but there were only a handful of vessels in the German fleet at that time, so in 1868, aged fourteen, he set out for England to join the Royal Navy. Considering that he never entirely lost his German accent he had a remarkably successful career, culminating in his appointment as First Sea Lord, the pinnacle of his profession, in 1912. Tall and handsome, with dark, hooded eyes, Louis was also a good dancer and an entertaining raconteur, and as a young midshipman he had wooed a succession of pretty girls in the ports where his ship put in. His dalliances did not always require much effort. As an orderly officer in the suite of his cousin, the Prince of Wales, on his tour of India in 1875, he recalled one evening when after dinner each member of the prince’s entourage was guided to his own private ‘enormous divan with many soft cushions. Refreshments and smoking material were laid out on a little table. On the divan reclined a native girl in transparent white garments.’ On another occasion, when the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir arranged for a well-born girl to be placed in the Prince of Wales’s tent, Louis contrived to transfer her to his own.
A few years later, while serving as an officer of the royal yacht Osborne, Louis fell in love with the Prince of Wales’s mistress, Lillie Langtry, the beautiful Jersey-born actress. When she became pregnant, there were at least two other possible candidates for the child’s paternity, but Louis believed that he was the father and gallantly told his parents that he intended to stand by Lillie.
His parents were anxious to avoid a scandal, however, and promptly arranged a financial settlement for her. Queen Victoria then fixed it for Louis to be posted to the frigate Inconstant, which was to undertake a voyage round the world under sail, ‘a project designed to keep him out of harm’s way for a long time’.
Soon after his return he set his romantic sights on his young first cousin once removed from the main branch of the Hessian royal family, whom he married in 1884. His bride was twenty-year-old Princess Victoria, who had been born in 1863 at Windsor Castle, the eldest of seven children of Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse and Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s second daughter. Princess Victoria had experienced profound sadness during her short life, losing her younger brother, Fritz, when he fell out of a window at the age of ten, and as a teenager unwittingly initiating an even greater family tragedy. In the winter of 1878, aged fifteen, she had fallen ill with diphtheria, but before the symptoms of her illness became apparent she had read aloud parts of Alice in Wonderland to her five younger siblings.
All but one of them had caught the disease, as had her father, the Grand Duke. Her mother, Alice, had insisted on nursing them all and, though urgently warned not to do so by her doctors, had hugged and kissed her son while telling him that his little sister May had died. A month later Alice, too, succumbed to the disease. She was thirty-five.
After their mother’s death, young Victoria had taken charge of running the household and looking after her four surviving siblings – Ella, Irene, Ernie and Alix – supported from afar by her grandmother, Queen Victoria, who urged her to ‘look upon me as a mother’.
By the time she fell in love with Louis, she was still only nineteen, he twenty-eight, tall, dashing and sun-tanned from his travels – ‘a fairy-tale prince’ according to at least one biographer.
In some ways they seemed ill-suited. Despite his undoubted qualities, Louis was rather flashy, and loved dressing up in uniforms – he also boasted a large tattoo of a dragon stretching from his chest and to his legs.
Victoria was on the whole more self-effacing and was slightly embarrassed by Louis’ sartorial flamboyance. She was also more of a free spirit, as well as being highly intelligent. ‘Radical in her ideas,’ wrote Philip Ziegler, ‘insatiably curious, argumentative to the point of perversity, she leavened the somewhat doctrinaire formality of Prince Louis.’
Despite their differences, it proved to be an extremely successful marriage and produced four remarkable children.
Philip’s mother, Alice, was the eldest of these, ‘a fine sturdy baby’
born in 1885, at Windsor Castle, like her mother, in the presence of Queen Victoria, who from time to time helped the family out financially and did what she could to advance Louis’ naval career.
Alice was a handsome child, tall and slender with golden hair and large brown eyes.
However, she was slow in learning to talk and often had a strange faraway look,
which her mother at first mistook for absentmindedness. It was not until she was four that an aurist pronounced her almost completely deaf due to a thickening of the Eustachian tubes, which at that time was deemed inoperable although nowadays it would be curable.
Her condition, which improved very slightly as she grew older, made her unusually self-reliant, able to spend hours happily absorbed in her own company. Her mother was adamant that she should not draw attention to her disability and she was thus forbidden from asking anyone to repeat what they had said.
Required to disguise her confusion as best she could, she soon became a brilliant lip-reader and, because the family moved about so much, following Louis’ postings in Britain and Malta and summer holidays at the various Hessian schlosses, she learned to do so in several languages. Acquaintances often failed to notice any defect, as her mother would have wished, and so striking were her beauty, poise and accomplishments that the Prince of Wales reputedly remarked that ‘no throne is too good for her’.
In June 1902, she went to stay at Buckingham Palace for the coronation of King Edward VII, and met Andrea, Queen Alexandra’s nephew, who appeared to her to be ‘exactly like a Greek God’, so she later told her grandson Prince Charles.
The coronation was delayed at the last minute when the king fell ill with appendicitis, but there was still time before the various guests dispersed for Andrea and Alice to fall in love and become privately engaged. Alice’s mother Victoria later admitted that to begin with she was not in favour of this arrangement, thinking them too young.
It was also said – though she did not admit this – that she thought her daughter could do better than the fourth son of the insecure and impecunious King of Greece.
In July Alice and her mother returned home to Heiligenberg, from where she wrote to Andrea every day. On one occasion, when a week had gone by without a letter from him, a friend found her in tears, tormented by the thought that something must have happened to him or that he had changed his mind. The next morning she arrived at school glowing, having just received five letters in the post from Greece.
After an emergency operation to remove his appendix, Edward VII was well enough to be crowned in early August and Andrea and Alice returned to Buckingham Palace and travelled in the same carriage to Westminster Abbey, together with Alice’s mother and Andrea’s elder brother, George. After the coronation there was a further separation while Andrea was away on military duty in Greece, but in May 1903 he returned, Edward VII gave his consent and their engagement became official. The announcement came as a shock to some of the snootier European royalty, the octogenarian Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz bemoaning ‘the very youthful betrothal, so odd, no money besides!’ She even questioned the attendance of Andrea’s aunt, Queen Alexandra, at the wedding: ‘Why? There is surely no reason for it, a Battenberg, daughter of an illegitimate father, he a fourth son of a newly baked King!’
Still, the wedding at Darmstadt in October was a spectacular event and drew an impressive array of European royalty. Among those present was Tsar Nicholas II – Andrea’s first cousin, son of his aunt Dagmar, and husband of Alice’s aunt Alix – who gave the couple a Wolseley motor car and threw a bag of rice in Alice’s face as the couple drove away in it.
Three hundred and fifty Russian detectives patrolled the town to ensure the tsar’s safety.
There were two religious ceremonies, Protestant and Russian Orthodox, the first preceded by a thirty-strong royal procession into the chapel, followed by Andrea and his parents, and lastly Alice with hers. During the nervous exchange of vows, Alice was defeated by the bushiness of the priest’s beard and failed to lip-read the questions, so when asked whether she consented freely to marriage she replied ‘No’, and when asked whether she had promised her hand to someone else she said ‘Yes’.
They began their married life in a wing of the royal palace in Athens, spending summers at Tatoï or with her parents in England, Malta and Germany. Their first child, Margarita, was born in 1905, and that autumn they all moved to Larissa, a garrison town in Thessaly on the Turkish border, where Andrea was responsible for transforming mountain goatherds into cavalrymen.
Shortly after their return to Athens the following spring, their second daughter, Theodora, known in the family as Dolla, was born.
In 1907 the Greek royal family came under attack in the local press due to inflated estimates of the king’s wealth and a rumour that the princes were to receive annuities. ‘To be remunerated for doing nothing is the privilege of the Russian Grand Dukes,’ snarled one newspaper. In another the princes were accused of failing to take the lead in times of trouble, and of ‘loafing about the boulevards of Paris’ while Salonika was set ablaze by Bulgarians in 1902.
The British ambassador Sir Francis Elliot considered the charge of indifference undeserved and the criticisms ‘characteristic of this country where liberty is confounded with license, and disrespect for authority mistaken for independence’.
The rumblings continued, though, and in August 1909 disgruntled officers launched a coup d’état, with the aim of installing the charismatic Cretan nationalist Eleftherios Venizelos as prime minister and preventing the sons of the king from holding any high commands in the army. Andrea had by then completed his staff college exams but, for their father’s sake, he and his four brothers resigned their posts, leading to three years of demoralizing unemployment.
In 1912, though, he was able to resume his military career when Greece entered the First Balkan War against Turkey, with the aim of expanding Greek territory towards Constantinople and resolving the ownership of Crete. Andrea and his brothers made for Larissa to join the conquering army led by their eldest brother, Crown Prince Constantine, which then swept victoriously through southern and western Macedonia, repeatedly putting the Turks to rout. The campaign not only helped revive the popularity of the Greek princes but also provided Alice with the opportunity for what her biographer Hugo Vickers calls ‘her finest hour’.
Alice was inspired to become a nurse by the example of the grandmother whose name she had been given and more recently by the extraordinary precedent of her aunt Ella, Victoria’s younger sister. Ella was married to Tsar Alexander III’s brother, Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, the reactionary and widely disliked governor-general of Moscow. In February 1905 Serge had been blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb thrown at his carriage in the Kremlin. Hearing the explosion, Ella had rushed to the scene and, kneeling in the snow, calmly helped gather up his scattered remains, though other parts were later retrieved from nearby rooftops.
The murder brought about a profound change in Ella. Shortly afterwards she visited the assassin at the police station and vainly pleaded with him to repent. She withdrew from society, turned increasingly to her adopted Orthodox faith, became a vegetarian, gave away her jewels and furs, and – inspired by her mother’s ‘Alice Nurses’ at Darmstadt – opened a charitable convent where she lived as the abbess, sleeping on a bare wooden bed with no mattress and one hard pillow, and tending patients herself in the hospital wing. She founded a home for consumptives and an orphanage, and during the October Revolution in 1905 stole out of the besieged Kremlin each day to tend to the wounded in hospital.
Alice had seen for herself her aunt’s work when she visited Russia, and it made a deep impression on her. Since first arriving in Athens she had spent much of her time at the charitable Greek School of Embroidery and at the outset of the First Balkan War she had the school make 80,000 garments for the troops and refugees.
Then, leaving her three young daughters – her third, Cecile, had been born in 1911 – she went with Andrea and his brothers to Larissa, where in a burst of manic energy she established a hospital after finding that the army had no plan for one. ‘I myself forced the Military Authorities to fit out an operation room in 24 hours,’ she wrote to her mother.
Realizing it was taking fourteen hours for the wounded to be transported from the front, she then moved her hospital to the recently liberated town of Elassona at the foot of Mount Olympus, requisitioning a school and raiding Turkish houses for mattresses and bedding for 120 men. Alice was in the thick of it, changing bandages on ‘ghastly’ wounds, helping the doctors in ‘fearful operations, hurriedly done in the corridor amongst the dying and wounded waiting for their turn’, with barely any light, the battle still raging all around them, and scarcely any time for sleep between each batch of arrivals. ‘God! What things we saw!’ she wrote. ‘Shattered arms, and legs and heads, such awful sights – and then to have to bandage those dreadful things for three days and three nights. The corridor full of blood, and cast-off bandages knee high.’
She soon expanded her hospital, taking over four more houses and later, as the Greek army advance continued northwards, she moved on to Kozani, where on one occasion she found herself assisting at the amputation of a leg, administering chloroform and preventing the patient from biting his tongue. ‘Once I got over my feeling of disgust, it was very interesting, of course,’ she assured her mother. When the operation was over, the leg lay abandoned on the floor of the ward and Alice suggested someone ought to take it away. Her assistant duly picked it up, ‘wrapped it up in some stuff, put it under her arm and marched out of the hospital to find a place to bury it in. But she never noticed that she left the bloody end uncovered, and as she is as deaf as I, although I shouted after her, she went on unconcerned, and everybody she passed nearly retched with disgust – and, of course, I ended by laughing.’
As the Greeks pressed on through the snowy mountains towards Salonika, the capital of Macedonia, determined to wrest it from Turkish control before the Bulgarians did, Alice remained constantly at or near the front. In each place she passed through she left a well-organized hospital, work for which she would later be personally thanked by prime minister Venizelos.
On 12 November 1912 Venizelos accompanied the king and his heir as they rode in triumph through the streets of Salonika. There was great rejoicing throughout Greece, and Alice and Andrea went to stay with the king, who had installed himself in the Sultan’s villa in the city. In March 1913 Janina, the capital of Epirus, also fell to the Greeks – witnessed by Alice who was again organizing the hospitals – and by the end of the Second Balkan War that summer, which began when the Bulgarians ill-advisedly attacked both Greece and Serbia, Greece had almost doubled in size and population, having gained southern Epirus, Macedonia, Crete and some Aegean islands.
After the tribulations of recent years, these territorial gains were a source of great relief and happiness to King George, and at lunch one day, on 18 March 1913, he announced that he now intended to abdicate on his golden jubilee in October, leaving his newly popular and auspiciously named son Constantine to succeed him. As the lunch party broke up, one of the generals present ventured to warn the king that his habit of strolling freely about the streets was perhaps more dangerous in Salonika than it was in Athens, to which the king replied that he did not wish for such a sermon. Later that afternoon, accompanied by his equerry and two policemen, the king set out for his usual walk to the White Tower. On his way back, as he passed a café, a man came out and shot him dead with a revolver. The assassin turned out to be an insane Greek rather than a Bulgarian or Turkish nationalist as had been feared, and he subsequently leapt to his death from a window while awaiting trial.
King George I’s body was carried by sea to Athens, from where a train took the coffin to Tatoï. Crowds of peasants collected alongside the track and knelt as the train passed.
The British ambassador reported that
Tragic as was the manner of the King’s death, he was at least happy in the moment of it. He had seen the edifice he had laboured to construct for 50 years crowned by the victories of his army under the leadership of his son and successor. He had the assurance that his dynasty was at least firmly seated upon the throne which he had often during his long reign been tempted to abandon in despair. He had seen his aspirations realized beyond his wildest dreams. He will live on in the memories of his people as a martyr to the national cause.
King George’s son was now hailed in some newspapers as Constantine XII, successor to the last Greek ruler of Byzantium who had died during the siege of Constantinople in 1453, although in fact he ascended the throne as Constantine I. The British ambassador deemed him ‘inferior in intelligence to his father, and wanting in his dexterous pliability’, yet at the same time ‘a man of stronger character’ who ‘may well be fitted to deal with the new problems which will arise in the new situation’.
His reign was to prove rather less happy and considerably less enduring.
One of Constantine’s handicaps was that he had married Princess Sophie of Prussia, the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II. On the outbreak of the First World War he was thus torn between loyalty to his wife and a feeling that Germany might win on the one hand, and pressure to join the Allies on the other. His decision to stay neutral placed Greece at odds with both sides and thereafter lowered the Greek royal family in the estimation of the British people.
The outbreak of the European war placed Alice, born a German princess yet with her father serving as Britain’s First Sea Lord, in a similarly awkward position. Louis of Battenberg had been responsible for mobilizing the British fleet prior to the war and on 4 August 1914 he sent the signal: ‘Admiralty to All Ships. Commence hostilities against Germany.’
By then he had served for forty-six years in the Royal Navy, yet his accent and mannerisms were still faintly German, and he kept German staff in his household. Within the navy, he was acknowledged as an exceptional sea officer and Fleet Commander, and a kind and courtly man; however, his insistence that there were certain things that were done more efficiently in his country of birth inevitably aroused hostility towards him.
Following the outbreak of war, the British popular press whipped up a wave of scurrilous anti-German paranoia, during which anyone or anything deemed to be of German origin was liable to come under attack. Shop windows were smashed, dachshunds were kicked in the street and innocent people with Teutonic-sounding names were arrested and imprisoned without trial. When two German cruisers mysteriously evaded a British force in the eastern Mediterranean and made it to Constantinople, it was whispered that a British admiral must have assisted them and that Louis Battenberg was a German spy. Of course, George V, too, had a German name and connections, and the wholeheartedness of his commitment to the Allied cause also came under scrutiny. On one occasion, Lord Kitchener ‘had solemnly to assure the Cabinet that lights seen flashing over Sandringham during a German air sortie were caused by the car of the rector returning home after dinner’.
Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, attempted to make light of all the xenophobic hysteria, and when told off for drinking hock, he responded: ‘I am interning it.’
Nevertheless, he worried about the effect of all the attacks on his First Sea Lord’s powers of concentration, and soon decided that the country’s best interests would be served by replacing Louis with the more dynamic Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher.
It was with some relief, therefore, that he accepted Louis’ resignation on 29 October 1914, even though it deprived the Royal Navy of one of its shrewdest strategic brains.
The whole episode was a great tragedy for Louis. ‘I feel for him deeply,’ wrote George V in his diary, ‘there is no more loyal man in the country.’
However, Battenberg’s younger son, also called Louis but known in the family as Dickie, then a fourteen-year-old naval cadet at Osborne, casually remarked to a contemporary: ‘It doesn’t really matter. Of course I shall take his place.’
His vow to avenge the family’s humiliation would propel him on a career path even more remarkable than that of his father.
During the early part of the First World War, Andrea was stationed at Salonika, but in 1916 his brother King Constantine sent him on a diplomatic mission to London and Paris to assure the Allies that Greece was not on the German side. Alice remained mostly in Athens, looking after their four daughters. The youngest of these, Sophie, had been born in 1914 and was always known in the family as Tiny, although she grew to be the tallest of the four sisters. Shortly after her birth her teenage uncle Dickie had written to his mother, Victoria: ‘Please congratulate Alice from me, but it was silly not to have a boy for once in a way.’
The political situation in Greece remained fraught throughout the war. Venizelos favoured siding with the Allies, thinking that they would win and be more sympathetic towards Greece’s remaining territorial ambitions. He also considered the Allies’ superior naval power vital to the protection of his maritime country. In 1916 he staged a coup and established a rival government in Salonika, which promptly declared war on Germany. When King Constantine continued to insist on Greek neutrality, the Allied fleet bombarded Athens.
Alice was at the embroidery school at the time and drove home ‘through a rain of bullets’ to find one of the nursery windows shattered by a shell. She quickly took her children down to the palace cellar, where Constantine’s queen Sophie was also sheltering.
During the subsequent blockade they both worked in soup kitchens. Eventually, in June 1917, Constantine bowed to Allied demands that he leave the country, a humiliating finale to a reign that had begun with such high hopes.
While the banished king made his way to Switzerland accompanied by his eldest son, Crown Prince George, whom the Allies also considered too pro-German, he was succeeded by his second son, Alexander. The other brothers, including Andrea, were soon asked to follow Constantine into exile, and Andrea and Alice were thus condemned to another spell of kicking their heels, this time at a hotel in St Moritz and later in Rome.
Alice’s parents in England, meanwhile, suffered further upheavals of their own. In the summer of 1917 George V decided to camouflage the royal family’s Germanic associations by renaming his dynasty the House of Windsor. Absurdly, no one in Britain seemed able to agree on what the previous name was, although the Kaiser declared that he was looking forward to attending a production of ‘The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ – one of his only recorded jokes. The king accompanied his change of name with a request that other members of the royal family relinquish all of their German names and styles and titles.
Alice’s father, His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg, thus found himself relegated to being the Marquess of Milford Haven, while his family name was translated into English as Mountbatten. He admitted to finding the change ‘a terrible break with one’s past’
and while staying with his elder son Georgie when his new title was announced, he wrote sadly in the visitors’ book: ‘Arrived Prince Jekyll, Departed Lord Hyde’.
Yet Louis’ predicament was mild compared with the branch of his family in Russia, where the tsar had been forced to abdicate following the outbreak of revolution in March 1917. George V, the tsar’s first cousin, briefly considered giving him sanctuary but then had second thoughts, fearful that his apparent endorsement of the old tsarist regime would antagonize Russia’s new rulers, who remained Britain’s allies in the war.
The offer of asylum was thus withdrawn.
In April 1918 the tsar and tsarina (Alice’s aunt Alix, who had become deeply unpopular in Russia due to her perceived Germanic aloofness and devotion to Rasputin) and their teenage children were taken to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, where three months later they were executed. Alice’s other aunt, Ella, had carried on with her selfless work, refusing all offers of asylum from abroad. In 1918 she, too, was arrested by Lenin’s secret police and taken with other members of the imperial family and their retainers to the mining town of Alapayevsk, one hundred miles from Ekaterinburg. One night they were woken up and told to get dressed. They were then blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs before being driven to the edge of a mine shaft, where they were thrown in. They were heard saying prayers until, it seems, they were eventually killed by a combination of hand grenades and burning brushwood. The martyrdom of Ella in particular (she was later recognized as a saint) would have a profound influence on the future course of Alice’s life – and by extension that of Prince Philip.
The new Greek king, Alexander, had reigned for only three years when, in October 1920, he was out walking his wolfhound, Fritz, in the garden at Tatoï and the dog was attacked by a tame Spanish monkey. While trying to release the monkey from Fritz’s teeth, the king was attacked by its mate and severely bitten in the leg. The wound was quickly cleaned and dressed but after two days a fever set in. Three weeks after that the king died from blood poisoning, aged twenty-six, leaving a young and beautiful widow, Aspasia, who was five months pregnant with their daughter Alexandra, Philip’s cousin, childhood friend and future biographer.
Winston Churchill later remarked that it was perhaps no exaggeration to say that ‘a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite’ – an allusion to Greece’s subsequent military campaign in Turkey, which was led by Alexander’s father Constantine, who returned to the throne after his son’s death. In the lead-up to this latest adventure, fearing Italian encroachment in the region, the Allies had agreed to the landing of Greek troops in Smyrna (now Izmir, on the west coast of Turkey), the wealthiest of Ottoman cities and the embodiment of that empire’s reputation for cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance. Smyrna had more Greek inhabitants than Athens and had been a long-cherished objective of Greek nationalists. In June 1920 the Greeks had advanced further into Turkish territory and in August, under the Treaty of Sèvres, they had gained Thrace while their administration of Smyrna and its hinterland had been extended for a further five years – after which the region was to be annexed if the local parliament so decided. Venizelos’s supporters boasted of having created a Greece of ‘the two continents and of the five seas’.
After King Alexander’s death, his younger brother Paul was invited by Venizelos to assume the throne, but he refused on the grounds that his father and elder brother had never renounced their prior rights. Venizelos then called a general election in November 1920 in which he offered the Greek people the freedom to vote for the restoration to the throne of Alexander’s father, the exiled King Constantine. To the amazement and dismay of virtually all foreign observers they did so, decisively removing Venizelos and his government from office in the process.
Andrea, by now balding and wearing a monocle, was at last able to return to Greece from Rome with his family. On arrival at Phaleron Bay he and his brother Christopher were ‘borne on the shoulders of the populace, frenzied with joy’ all the way to Athens, so Alice recorded, and he was then required to make a speech from the balcony of the royal palace ‘to the vast crowds gathered below’.
A month later, on 19 December, King Constantine returned from exile to the throne amid much Greek rejoicing – although the Allies refused to recognize him.
Having previously criticized the campaign in Turkey, once in power it soon became clear that the new royalist government now planned to continue it with a spectacular offensive eastwards from occupied Smyrna towards the towns of Kutahya and Eski Shehir in the heart of Anatolia. ‘The morale of the army, its spirit and its certainty of success are high,’ wrote King Constantine. ‘God grant that we may not suffer disappointment! It will be a very hard struggle, which will cost us enormous sacrifices; but what a triumph if we win!’
Andrea returned to the Greek army in the rank of major general and after years of depressing inactivity he was raring to go.
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Philip Eade
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘The narrative is as suspenseful as any thriller. Truly, an excellent read’ Lynn Barber, Sunday TimesMarried for almost seventy years to the most famous woman in the world, Prince Philip is the longest-serving royal consort in British history. Yet his origins have remained curiously shrouded in obscurity.In the first book to focus exclusively on his life before the coronation, acclaimed biographer Philip Eade uncovers the extraordinary story of the prince’s turbulent upbringing in Greece, France and Nazi Germany, during which his mother spent five years in a secure psychiatric clinic and his father left him to be brought up by his Mountbatten relations in England just when he needed him most.Remarkably the young prince emerged from this unsettled background a character of singular vitality and dash – self-confident, capable, famously opinionated and devastatingly handsome. Girls fell at his feet, and the princess who was to become his wife was smitten from the age of thirteen.Yet alongside the considerable charm and intelligence, the prince was also prone to volcanic outbursts and to putting his foot in it. Detractors perceived in his behaviour emotional shortcomings, a legacy of his traumatic childhood, which would have profound consequences for his family and the future of the monarchy.Published to coincide with the prince’s ninetieth birthday and containing new material from interviews, archives and film footage, this revelatory biography is the most complete and compelling account yet of his storm-tossed early life.